


Dreaming Wide Awake

by PrincessDesire



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Canonical Character Death, Dreamsharing, First Meetings, I don't know Star Wars very well but I tried dammit, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, inspired by fanvid, not one of the lovebirds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-09-12 17:55:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 22
Words: 53,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16877553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrincessDesire/pseuds/PrincessDesire
Summary: This fic was inspired by Solohux's fanvid https://youtu.be/Jrf5S0DD6Vc . I made some changes to flesh it out and add my own spin.Dom is an unhappy cubicle jockey. He feels hopeless and stuck until he begins to have dreams about being a general in a space battle. There he has power and order. Ben is an insomniac plagued by nightmares of a world where he is a homicidal warlord. No amount of therapy working through his daddy issues seems to resolve them. Then, his nighttime alter ego meets General Hux and suddenly the curse of his dreams doesn't seem so bad.





	1. Dom Has the Sads

**Author's Note:**

  * For [solohux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/solohux/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Dreaming Wide Awake](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/438192) by Solohux. 



The pointed toe caps of his brogues send out little clippy announcements of each of his steps. With the inclusion of the tapping raindrops around, the world has a distinctly staccato feel to it. Dom has his umbrella, standard business issue black, protecting his suit from the rain. It’s rather like he’s the boy in the bubble really, only the bubble only protects his top half and there are already splashes to his socks that will make the tube ride home more miserable. He sighs at it, attempting to convey to the rain that he will simply not stand for its presence today. Just like the twenty or so days preceding this one, the rain pays no heed.

  
As expected, the cold clammy dampness trickles into his socks. It’s also there in his left wrist cuff because he’d clumsily closed his umbrella before finding a seat on the train. As it rolls along, he watches his fellow passengers, idly though, without much enthusiasm for the task. They look as bored and unhappy as himself. The odor of fish wafts through the compartment and it mixes unpleasantly with the moldy subterranean smell.

  
He tries not to reflect on the feelings about the meeting with his boss; better to wait until he’s inside his own flat where he’s free to cry, not that he will, or to break something, not that he will. He definitely does not want to think, while surrounded by apathetic strangers, about the judgment in his boss’s voice nor the implications of hearing that particular phrase uttered by someone with whom he isn’t sleeping. Nope, instead, he wills himself to think of the things that need doing around the flat. It’s the 15th of the month, so it’s loo cleaning day. He’ll also need to take down the recycling, the paper and plastic canisters if not the glass. Dom rarely drinks at home and the little glass container is usually empty. He’s tempted to get a jump on his weekend chores, but then that would just screw up the schedule. Perhaps there are some items on his annual list that could be completed, but he has that in writing and not on his phone, so he isn’t quite sure off the top of his head what those are.

  
The meeting thoughts still needle in. Luckily, the trip home isn’t long, and then he has his chores to keep him distracted. He turns up music, dons his rubber gloves, and sets to work getting rid of as much bacteria as he can (99.9% per the bottle) while humming along. Millicent wraps around his ankles as he works, either trying to trip him so that she can eat him, or just curious, as though he never cleans and she has no concept of what this new activity means. He won’t be able to pet her until his work is done, something that always miffs her and the resentment builds as things become shinier. The toilet itself gets weekly attention, and the shower, scrubbing the tiles and the glass doors, is every two weeks. It never accumulates mold, only a small smattering of Millicent’s fur (if she goes in there, it’s while he’s asleep because he’s never witnessed her investigating his various soaps) and the odd red hair (which he believes but desperately hopes he’s imagining seeing more often now that he’s in his mid-30s).

  
He removes all the mirror smudges to Imagine Dragons, puts away the clean dishes to Queen, sorts in chronological order a pile of magazines that Millicent peskily knocked off a shelf to Sir Sly, and returns to Poets of the Fall after taking out the recycling. He partially ruins his work with a quick shower, but the hot water feels like it burns off bacteria that the gloves couldn’t prevent touching his skin. Millicent watches from the downturned lid of the toilet, judging the sanity of a creature that would willingly submit itself to a bath. He chitters to her, unable to touch her fur with the water still clinging to him, and she arches up her spine eager to be petted, disgruntled and impatient while he dresses in flannel pants and a white crew neck t-shirt. He’s warm enough from the shower that he doesn’t immediately put over his house robe.

  
Dom’s couch, nostrils filled with tea steam, lap full of entitled purring cat. That’s where he is when the conversation with Reilly resurfaces. “You’re a control freak.” The first time that his ex-boyfriend Abbas had called him that, Dom had felt that it was hyperbolic, just exaggerated emotions during a heated argument. With the accusation’s second appearance, however, it was no longer ignorable as a flip insult; it became a possible character flaw, potentially requiring deep personal insight, long sessions with a therapist, or an all-out fingers-in-his-ears denial that anything could be wrong with him. Hearing it from his boss eleven long months after Abbas had moved out, Tesco boxes littering every room of the apartment for nearly three weeks before that, Dom had felt the deep frown set into his lips and forehead and the deep dread of how Reilly’s choice of words was going to encircle his thoughts set into his belly.

  
"It's just a joke, Dom!" Reilly had said, obviously observing the look of dismay on his face. Then, "Mostly."

  
The office could be any in London, any in the world for that matter. Computers and cubicles, pens and paper shredders. Even though Reilly is his direct superior, he doesn't have a real office with walls, not even a spot by one of the rare and coveted windows. As a matter of fact, Dom's boss is a rung nearly as low as himself on the corporate ladder of First Order Commercial Realty.

  
"I mean, it's okay to have ambition. But, look, you just got here seven months ago. Give it time. You still have a lot to learn. Give it a couple of years, then we can see about putting you in charge of your own team. Hell, maybe you'll even take over my position by then.

  
The horror that Dom felt in that moment was sublime. It was a two-fold horror. A little voice in his head saying, "Abbas was right - you are a control freak" and then the louder jovial voice of Reilly announcing that in years he might someday win the lottery of slightly below middle management.

  
He'd never understood how anyone could feel suicidal until that moment. That isn't even hyperbole. He could literally see his entire life before him, a long subway train headed down one long track, no deviations, and, more importantly, not even being his own conductor even though the train had "my life" splattered across the side in yellow spray paint. He'd never felt the meaningless of life so acutely until then. It might not even be life in general, but his in particular, because others around him seemed to have so much more autonomy in what they chose to do.

  
Reilly had been aware of the impact of his words, though he might not have understood why they’d hit so hard or how deeply the wound went. He'd made jokes, tried to lessen the blow, but soon enough, he’d left Dom to his own thoughts, to his probably ashen dejected face. All Dom had wanted when submitting his formal proposal was a small team, maybe three or four people underneath him. That’s all, he knew, that he would need to show them how efficiently the company could be run with his ideas, with his abilities, leading the way. He certainly hadn’t anticipated being told that he needed to devote years to his current position to even consider doing so. Even less had he expected to be taunted for his ambition.

  
There’s an oft-quoted belief that animals can sense their owners’ moods. Millicent, ungraciously licking her anus on his lap could, therefore, be seen as a clear demonstration of where his life sits right now. Or, she could just be oblivious and enjoying the taste of whatever her own ass tastes like. Either way, he bumps her off. It’s time to head to the pub. Alcohol certainly won’t make him feel better, but perhaps the camaraderie of other working stiffs will give his mind something to focus on outside of his own self-pity.

 

 

“Your owner is a control freak,” Dom announces to Millicent upon arriving home. She creates meow circles around his feet, returning his announcement with her own - that she can see the bottom of her food dish and therefore the surrounding circle of food is no longer valid. “And, he’s battered.”

  
He hangs his sodden coat on the three-pronged rack next to his door. He’d only walked two blocks yet it looks as though he’s been for a swim while wearing the thing. He flutters his lips at it, not quite a raspberry. “Well, you hang there then.” He smiles down at the cat. “Both of us need to dry out a bit, eh?”

  
He talks to himself as he rifles through the cupboards for a wet can of food. “Eat well tonight for we may die tomorrow!” he says, plucking the tin of salmon flavored glop from behind a sack of jasmine rice.

  
He pulls the ring top then stares in surprise at his left hand, the hand that was holding the can far above the rim, the hand that now is positively squirting blood. “Well shit,” he says before the world begins to spin. He lands with one knee on the laminate floor. Millicent, still desperate for food, stands with her paws atop his quads, greedy nose jabbing at the can he’s still holding. “Shit.” he says again, vision receding and ears ringing. “I’m going to faint,” he says, lying down full length on his kitchen floor.

  
He doesn’t faint. Lying down prevents full-on loss of consciousness, but it takes several minutes of bleeding out onto the floor before his sight and hearing fully return. The ringing slowly transitions into the sound of cat jaw-smacking and the overhead light looks less like one of those electricity balls with streaks of light and dark zagging out from its center. He looks at his blood-drenched hand. It makes him feel woozy but oddly curious.

  
Dom begins to chuckle. It’s a delirious ale-induced laughter at the absurdity of life. He considers, briefly, that if he had another can of cat food handy, he might be able to aim for his right wrist next time. The thought never really sinks all the way in, because even batting around the idea of suicide seems dangerous, like its inviting depression to dig its way further down inside him, to the core of who he is.

  
When he sits up, it’s tentative, feeling it out. His head is pounding, but all of his senses remain intact. He grips tightly onto the counter as he stands, rather like learning how to ice skate when he’d been a child. He fares better on the tile than he had at the rink and he has none of his peers to judge him here, only Millicent who, after finishing off her meal has shuffled off somewhere else, probably to return to arsehole cleaning.

  
It would probably be smart to stave off the bleeding before cleaning it, but he’s right there in the kitchen and antibacterial soap always seems like a good idea. When he finishes getting imagined cat food particles out of the gash, he wraps the whole hand up mummy-style with paper towels.

  
The perfect end to a perfect day, he thinks bitterly, drunkenly, as he walks into his bedroom only to find that Millicent has coughed up a hairball on the duvet. He hurls the dirty cover onto the floor with his uninjured hand. His dramatic dive onto the bed has a touch of petulant adolescent to it, but at the moment, he’s far from caring. He just wants to sleep off this day. Honestly, he just wants to sleep off his life. Would he really be missing anything if he just pulled a Rip Van Winkle, slept through the rest of the tube track on which his life train is going? It’s not like there will be any points of interest, no other passengers, no scenic views out the window. He curls underneath the thin sheet, fully clothed (minus his shoes), and fully ready to wink out of existence for a while.


	2. Hux Inspects the Training Facility

General Hux’s eyes are red and irritated. He wipes at the tears that spill out, a response to the too bright light. The suns on this planet are too large. He feels like he’s under interrogation lights just standing here. There’s also the issue of his skin; it will burn a Tandgor gem red which will fade into a starfield of freckles. He doesn’t plan to be planetside long; Hux has always felt more comfortable above planet where he can keep an eye on the comings and goings of the galaxy from a better vantage point, but there are always going to be the occasions where his physical presence is necessitated. Hux tells his skin to be patient - the ground transport will be along any minute to take them into the facility. 

He’s accompanied by some troopers (only a fool would travel without protection when their life’s work is so important) and two First Order lieutenants. He likes to oversee everything personally which, considering the expanse of his tasks, explains well the perpetual dark circles beneath his eyes and his constant intake of coffee. 

The transport arrives and without a word, the small group climbs in, the troopers’ boots loud upon the metal. The facility is huge by necessity and it has a hive-like layout, clusters of soldiers in different stages of development, but each separated by long intermingling-discouraging corridors, some of which are externally accessed only. It is imperative that the troops never be alone. They must always see themselves as part of their unit, and then, part of the First Order. The self is not to factor into their thinking.The transport is slender but long and it is open air so it provides no defense against the UVB rays injecting themselves into his skin. When the transport slides into the building, Hux’s eyes take on the duty of adjusting to the difference in brightness while he goes over in his mind where they have entered. Memorizing the schematic of a location this size is no small feat, but it was completely imperative and so he did. There are three landing bays and their ship brought them to the central-most one, Desert Bay. From there, they travel through the main receiving area which is used primarily for cargo, but also for troops returning from deployment, towards the Orange Command Hub. 

One of the many things that Armitage’s father Brendol had firmly believed was planning for all contingencies. It is from his design that this building was constructed. Those participating in the program, overseers, tacticians, instructors, programmers, maintenance crews, all of them are only permitted to congregate in a firmly maintained maximum number. There are six different sleeping areas for administration, all located towards the outer perimeters of the complex. Should the training completely fail, which is as close to impossible as anything, the trainees would not be able to effectively revolt against the programmers. To further decrease the chances of this occurrence, trainees are discouraged primarily through physical distance and social correction not to form friendships/alliances with members outside their group. Competition being what it is, the trainees themselves have initiated rivalries, some becoming violent in rare cases. 

Hux rotates which hub that he uses. It serves the dual purpose of his father’s intention plus he likes how it keeps the administration on their toes, never quite knowing what to expect. He may not, even with his six-foot stature, inherently display an imposing figure but he has honed his image down dagger sharp. He takes pleasure in knowing that they will have to ask around as to where they’re expected to go and then scramble across the large complex to meet him there. He’s actually requiring the maximum allowed staff in the one meeting room. At present, the whole complex hosts 784 on-site staff. A small number compared to the 160,000 soldiers that are undergoing their training. It’s impressive that Brendol’s methods are so effective that such a small group can effectively control the personalities of so many. Hux has no difficulty admitting to himself that the same methods were used to a degree on him, since he’s quite pleased with the outcome. He’s glad that he’s not one of the civilians that he sees unable to focus, living for nothing, afraid of effort and control. 

The room, comprised of 60 staff, most programmers, stands at attention upon the arrival of Hux’s retinue. The meeting itself is dull, as a lot of the finer details of his position tend to be. The only reason that he finds them interesting at all, is that he’s capable of looking at both the minute and the grand plans. He can identify how one order to a lackey can make or break an empire, can be a pivotal cog in the universal machine. 

First, they walk him through successes and failures resulting from modifications enacted following his last visit. He comments on these, offering alternatives in the cases of the failures, and noting, mentally and by way of recording robot, the successes to be used again in the future. The program has a very low failure rate, so it is unsurprising that at this visit they bring to him no news of any resistant trainees. There have been, in the past, but even for those, there is a protocol. If they’re fully fledged troopers, there is a “re-education program,” meant to reinforce what they’ve already learned. If they’re still trainees, and if there is a failure in this area, it’s usually during adolescence when hormones mislead them into thinking they are individuals with rights and unique perspectives and prospects, then they might be scrubbed from the program entirely. Better to toss out one bad Jogan fruit than to allow it to spoil all the others. The programmers don’t make a big show of the failure’s execution, so as to not increase any us versus them mentality. It’s a quick blast to the head and then disposal. Again, this is something that happens rarely; most trainees can be salvaged even during adolescence with chemicals, though the program places these as an undesirable method. Behavioural changes are always preferable to just throwing drugs at the problem. They’re out to create soldiers not addicts.

After this, the group discusses things, either policy changes or tangible items, that they need. The demand for blasters and blaster energy is always high, obviously, and the New Order can come by them, though not as readily as its predecessor, The Empire, easily. Food rations always remain the same, though occasionally, the programmers may ask that certain planets be contacted to expand on options for themselves. This time, they request that the Melahna system be opened up for potential food trade. Hux says that he’ll look into it.

It’s this type of minutiae that he must deal with before finally getting the chance to look around the facility. It’s not an attractive building, not that Hux is looking for that element. There is visible tubing hanging from the ceiling and the walls do not always start at 90 degree angles, giving the impression that the world is slightly wrong, a touch askew. As with his last visit, everything seems to be in order. There are no crates sitting unminded in the cargo bays. No swaths of floor appear dirty, even in the dorms of the younger trainees. He stands in the back of one of the classrooms and observes a tactical maneuvers class. The children are disciplined enough to keep their attention focused on their programmer instead of the stranger in the back. He watches them tap notes onto their pads. Later, the trooper that he stops randomly in the hallway reacts to his questions in exactly the same way as his last spontaneous interviewee. It certainly appears that everything is how it should be here.

After confirming that all the items on his checklist are done, Hux leads his team back to the Desert launch bay, back to the great darkness that hides behind this planet’s too bright suns. He luxuriates in the pride that comes from knowing that he completed all his tasks within only a four minute margin of what he’d estimated. 


	3. Ben is Sleep-Deprived

It’s not possible to jump out of a dream, but Ben is trying. His arms and legs whirl around, restrained by his bedding. He is a scared blanket octopus thrashing around. His breath comes to him only with effort, making a loud suck sound as air hits his lungs for the first time since waking. Soon, the room is filled with the sound of his panting. Everything feels hot and terrifying and too small. “Goddammit!” he yells as he finally gets to his feet, the sheet still gripping one ankle possessively. He kicks it off angrily. He glares at the mess of bedding then at the clock. The red 2:28 glares back. 

He’d gotten, what two hours of sleep? It felt like he’d been stuck in that nightmare for an eternity. He’d been hurting that man, choking the life out of him with just his will, and he’d liked it. What kind of fucked up person has dreams like that? He’d heard of nightmares about falling. What he wouldn’t give for a falling dream. No, he has to have blood and death, chaos and violence. And why do they always seem to happen in space? He doesn’t watch sci-fi movies, has only seen the first two series of Star Trek! He kicks the pile of mashed up sheet and blanket with one socked foot. His other sock seems to have been lost to the great night battle. 

Snoke, the oversized twisted demon who commands his dream self, was telling him that he was being sent to a new place, a ship where he was to oversee the construction of the greatest weapon ever built. Ben, as the space warlord Kylo Ren, had bowed his head obediently to his master, who looked like Hugh Hefner if he was in the Thriller music video, but then lost his goddamn mind when the transmission had cut. Ben doesn’t even know why Kylo was angry, but by extension, he’d been as well. He’d choked someone, it was getting harder to remember but he thinks maybe it was one of the weird brainwashed soldiers that surround him because of his involvement in the First Order. Because Kylo can use the force, a sort of mishmash of telepathy and telekinesis and psychic abilities all rolled into one, he could choke the man with his mind and then feel the physical sensation from both sides. It was almost like choking himself, because he was getting that feedback, hearing the brain crying out for air, even as he was also feeling the surge of triumph and power to be able to end someone’s life without consequence, without remorse.

Ben decides to go for a walk. 

It’s a stupid idea because there’s feet of fucking snow on the ground, but he bundles up, big snow boots and padded water-resistant orange coat. He completes the utilitarian but silly ensemble with his red and white Red Sox beanie. 

The whiteness of the snow creates a sort of ground glow so that he isn’t just wandering around in pitch blackness, which would creep him the hell out with the current place his mind is at. Instead, the serene quiet of winter creates an artificial atmosphere of vast peace. If the Buddha was a landscape, he’d be a wintry field in New England.

He mars the smooth terrain with his crunching steps and ruins the peaceful atmosphere by looking at his cellphone. Even with the brightness turned down, it cheapens the road, like Walmart lighting. Facebook: political commentary spoken in only absolutes (and if you disagree with me, you’re a fucking idiot), pet pictures (the modern equivalent of forcing people to look at how cute your kids are), pictures of teenagers doing shit that Ben hasn’t even done in his 30s (how kickass can black belts be if a thirteen year old has one?), and vague emotional cries for help (“I guess I’m doomed to be alone forever”). Still, the constantly updating stream is addictive, studies have proven that, always encouraging its users to long for perpetual affirmation. So, even though he puts his phone away after becoming annoyed with the lack of content, it’s back out again only minutes later. 

Every night, well, most nights, Ben sits down for 30 minutes of meditation, usually following a brief yoga routine. He’s never had a shrink that didn’t recommend meditation, though they think that it should ease his mind enough to maybe stop the nightmares. They’re wrong, of course, but meditation is so pivotal to his well-being, so interlaced with his sense of self, that he can’t imagine his life without those moments, even if they have never been able to stop Kylo Ren or Snoke or Han Solo from ruling the unconscious near-third of his life. 

Technically, it’s not the nightmares that keep him in therapy, but the “daddy issues.” Everyone else seems to have them too, but his subconscious can’t deal with it like others do. He doesn’t have dreams that a wild bear that’s actually his dad rips into his heart with long adamantium claws or anything. No, instead he dreams about killing people in space. How does that relate to his daddy issues? Who the fuck knows? Certainly not the therapists his insurance company throws wads of cash to. 

Ben’s heard the phrase “correlation, not causation,” and is by this point pretty damn sure that it applies. It would be easier if the daddy issues caused his nightmares. Then, working through his issues would fix the dreams. He’s pretty much come out the other side, he feels, with how he functions after his fucked up childhood. He’s examined the damages with a psychological magnifying glass, released the demon of taboo and secrecy by sharing it with others, and pretty much forgiven his parents, even if the absolution only goes one way. Does what he went through still mess with his interpersonal dynamics? Yeah, of course. Does he still indulge in wishful thinking, wasting precious energy to thinking about what could have been? A little, but it’s rare, usually around the holidays when he sees happy families epitomize what he didn’t have. But he’s nowhere near as bad as he used to be. He’s not even as bad as he was only a few years ago when he was still wielding humor like a weapon, joking about his abuse, preemptively wounding himself so that no one else could. He met tons of people with shitty upbringings of their own, so they’d throw their own ill-timed and inappropriate humor into the works. Just two damaged human beings trying to be whole. 

The shrinks have helped. If they didn’t, he wouldn’t keep seeing them. They ask him if he wants to hurt people in real life, like he does in his dreams. Honestly, sometimes he does, but Ben thinks most people do. Someone cuts you off in traffic, you think about smashing into the back of their car, that sort of thing. He’s never, like, covered his house in plastic and then invited someone over for stabby time or anything. It’s only when he’s asleep that he gets bloody thoughts. Most of the time he’s hurting others - slashing into someone with a sword (a space laser sword of course - because he’s a fucking nerd even in his dreams), choking someone, commanding a ship to destroy other ships, all kinds of things. Other times, he’s getting hurt. He has a recurring group of nightmares about his training with Snoke, the physical and mental abuses that he endured to become a master of the force. There’s also when his attacks on others don’t go unpunished, when he’s hit hard by a fist or shot with a laser. Two of his shrinks were way more interested in the dreams where he gets hurt, probably seeing it as a self-harm style cry for help or something. And, he can’t even say to them that he doesn’t get some kind of enjoyment out of the feeling, at least while he’s in the dream. There was one where he’d had broken ribs and the pain was, rather than debilitating, empowering. He’d deliberately pressed on it, pounded on it with his fist, and felt a surge of power fueled by hate and pain, betrayal and rage. The details were fuzzy, like dreams tended to be, but he remembered acutely how good it had felt, how he’d fed off the agony and felt almost reborn from it.

His foot destroys a hidden branch, triggering a particularly loud snap. It resounds across the snow. The suburbs, where he rents the top floor of a house, are quiet tonight as always. It’s the kind of street that perpetually contains children on bicycles, as though they come with the properties. The neighbors get to mowing their lawns when they feel like it which ends up somewhere between meticulous golf course and hedge maze. They’re good people, quick to strike up conversation with him, but not overly nosy about why a man his age doesn’t have a wife. Perhaps that’s another reason why the rage only comes at night. His daytime hours are pretty damn good. He likes his job delivering insulated glass units to commercial distributors; it allows him a lot of time to listen to music or audiobooks. After he gets off, he heads to the gym then crashed out with TV or stays up late painting. On the weekends, he tends to hang out with a friend or two, maybe take in a game or eat fried food, and head to the bar in the evening to scrounge up a bedmate. 

He wants to try to sleep again tonight, just because it’s been so many too short nights in a row, and he might try, but the imagery of tonight’s dreams haunts him even out here where the world seems so beautiful. He wishes he could take some of this and bring it into his brain, maybe pretty up that fucked up violent space world from which he can’t seem to escape.

  
  


 

“Hey Dumbo!” calls Gwen, the CEO of Phasma Windows. She comes out of the warehouse rolling a rack behind her. Her short bobbed blonde hair is pulled into a chaotic ponytail. Her work uniform consists of a white short sleeved shirt under pea-green coveralls. The coveralls are always pristine, to the point where Ben wonders why she doesn’t just wear street clothes. Considering that Ben has never seen her outside of this environment, those could actually be her regular clothes. 

“Hey Lesbo,” he shouts back to her as he jumps down from the truck. The snow has been shoveled from the asphalt so he doesn’t fall on his ass, which is nice. 

She eyes his truck. “Goddamn, am I your only customer this winter?”

The haul is pretty sparse. In the summer, when everyone is doing construction work, he has trouble finding room for everything. But, jobs dry up when the snow falls. Luckily Ben doesn’t have to worry too much about that since he doesn’t run the company. They’re small enough that any orders that they do get, Ben will be the one that delivers them. “You’re the mouthiest.”

She smiles at him, face cuter than it should be when she does. They set to work transferring the units onto the rack. There’s only three for her today, but he doesn’t rib her back about the lack of business since that actually is hurting her finances. 

“Have you thought about my offer of Thanksgiving dinner?” she asks. 

“Didn’t I say no?” He had been perfectly clear about being busy this Thanksgiving, having already been asked by two sets of friends to dinner, but it’s nice that she’s pushing the issue; it makes him feel wanted. Not that she would ever invite him if she didn’t actually want him there, but the persistence is flattering.

She pushes one of the ponytail’s stray strands behind an ear. It’ll drop back down in less than a minute. It doesn’t appear that she gives much thought to her appearance. He’s never seen her wearing makeup. She fits in with that “bull dyke” stereotype. Not that being girly was really ever an option since she’s over six feet tall. “You did. But, did you change your mind?”

“Pretty eager to have me over, huh?” he asks. Then, flirtatiously, he leans in a bit towards her and says, voice low, “I didn’t think I was your type, Gwen.”

 She laughs and punches his shoulder, probably a little harder than necessary, but that’s kind of her style. “If I did swing that way, you think you’d be the first one on my list?”

He rubs his arm dramatically. “Well, I’d like to think top three, at least.”

One of her employees comes out needing her help with something. She assures the other woman that she’s coming right in with the delivery. Then, with an almost shy tilt of her head, she says, “Seriously though, you should come to dinner. My fiestas are epic. I’ll have a bird the size of a Buick and all the shots you can handle.”

“Thanks,” he says, and he means it. “I’ll let you know if my current plans change.”

It could be more awkward since she’s a client, but it’s been easy between them over the couple of years that he’s been dropping off units for her. There’s a lot of personality there. She can be, misogynist though it is to think, a ball-buster. He’s seen her interacting with her employees in frank and demanding ways. Not everyone can handle that kind of forthcoming honesty, complete lack of sugar-coating, from a boss. She’d warmed to Ben immediately. who

likes to think that he takes people as they are, won’t even judge a rice paper-white woman who throws out the word fiesta to describe a Thanksgiving dinner party.

“See ya!” she says, not even bothering to look back over her shoulder at him as she walks the cart back into her factory. It’s the second most southern stop that he’s got and if she didn’t order with as much regularity as she does, Empire Glass probably wouldn’t go so far out as the last one on his South run. Gwen’s probably his favorite client, definitely the best he’ll meet up with today, but there are still more on his route that he might shoot the shit with a little bit as well. 

Now if only he’d gotten some fucking sleep, his day would be just about perfect. 


	4. Hux Finds Kylo Exasperating

Dom is more motivated the week following his space dream than he’s felt in a long time. He handles client cases, does paperwork that he’s been putting off, and schedules his next dental appointment. It’s not that he usually views himself as incompetent, far from it, but lately, he feels as though he could single-handedly spin the Earth. That dream, the one that had been the impetus for his burst of inspiration, hasn’t faded with time like dreams normally do. This is probably because it’s about all he can think about and going over the same images has solidified them. He can still hear the clink of his boots on the metal grating of the facility’s walkways, feel the cold unpliant texture of his black gloves, and breathe in the taste of recirculated air kept in storage tanks. All these sensations hover around behind the thoughts of his foremind as it does things like making phone calls and updating account information. By the end of the week, he may no longer feel like General Armitage Hux, high ranking official in a space government, but he’s not feeling like pathetic desk jockey Dom MacDougal either. 

He spends the weekend watching sci-fi movies with Millicent. He compares the ship size to his own, well, his dream self’s own. Millicent doesn’t much care for cinema, she likes his body heat and the ugly four-toned fleece blanket that he keeps on his lap. It provides a layer of protection when she decides his legs needs to be massaged with her claws. His body is already hard at work healing his hand and he doesn’t want to add more perforations to its agenda. It itches like crazy, the reddish scab, and he worries that lingering bacteria from the cat food might be festering beneath the surface. At least he’s up on his tetanus vaccination, had checked the medical paperwork in his home filing cabinet just to be sure, so he needn’t worry about that particular disease. At work, he’d had many coworkers ask about the bandage. Rather than offer up that he’d been brought to near-fainting by a row with a cat food tin, he stretched the truth and told them that he mishandled some scrap metal. If they found any misalignment between his physical appearance and the manliness of the accident as he’d described it, they don’t mention it. 

On Sunday night while Millicent sleeps peacefully curled in a ball on the curve of his back, his head swirls with visions of spaceships and aliens from his movie marathon, and he returns again to Hux’s universe. 

 

One of Snoke’s knights is to be joining the crew and Hux is, as can be expected, pissed beyond reason. Despite performing all the duties of an officer with the title, Snoke still hasn’t officially made him Grand Marshall. Cruelly, Snoke dangles it over him, like one would a kitten with string and Hux can never resist trying for it again and again. Now comes this new slap in the face: he’s to share what power he’s come by with this Kylo Ren. “He has an important role to play in the First Order,” Snoke had said, as though Ren’s the only person in the galaxy that could be applied to. Even some of the damn stormtroopers could be said to play a role and they are no more pivotal than, though just as prevalent as, womp rats! 

He is predisposed, then, to hating this new intruder on  _ his _ Finalizer. He glares angrily at the bay doors as they open to permit Kylo Ren’s shuttle which is a one-man cruiser. At least This Kylo Ren is not so arrogant as to expect others to shuttle him around. Hux approves. This approval vanishes instantly when out of the tiny ship, rises a black robed and helmeted figure. One of Hux’s eyebrows rises judgmentally. Snoke’s apprentice is dressed up like Darth Vader? Hux actually looks around, as though he expects his men to be laughing instead of standing alertly at attention. No, this can’t be Snoke’s pupil, can it? 

After straightening up, the sad parody of Vader tilts his helmet first to one side and then the other leading Hux to wonder how long he’s been at the controls, cramped inside the dinky pod bay. Still, the man’s movements are far from clunky when he steps forward towards Hux. Regardless of any leg tingling or back cramps, he glides lithely, a duelist’s gait. Interesting. 

“Kylo Ren,” Hux says, not making it into a question out of deference to the austerity of the situation though he still thinks the costume is a bizarre choice for a knight. 

A deep, mechanically-modified voice resonates from the helmet’s mouthpiece. “General Hux,” the mask says back. 

“Welcome aboard the Finalizer. Master Snoke seems optimistically enthusiastic about your potential assistance to our cause.” Hux allows his bitterness to cut the syllables in the word “optimistically,” lets each one hammer home how unwelcome this Mr. Ren really is.

“As I understand it, he views my presence as a necessity. I’m sure you wouldn’t question the Supreme Chancellor’s judgment.” 

The challenge hangs in the air as Hux stares at where this costumed clown’s eyes must be. Finally, he replies, “You’ve had a long flight? Would you prefer to rest first or would you like to be debriefed right away?” 

“Whichever you would find more convenient, General.” Somehow, even with the voice modification, Ren sounds mocking. There’s something about the uptilt to his words, as though he’s patronizing him. 

“I’m sure we’ll find more of a use for you when you're rested. Hawkins here can show you to your quarters.”

The mask nods slightly at the officer who steps forward. “Very well,” he says. Hawkins pivots but walks slowly, giving Kylo Ren a chance to add anything more to the conversation before they depart for the officers’ quarters. It appears though that both men are finished with whatever they were doing, because Ren follows the officer and Hux pulls out a tablet, ready to move on to less annoying tasks that must be done. 

 

Their first meeting is  _ not _ an exceptional one. Every interaction they have in the two weeks following Ren’s arrival proves itself just as infuriating. Ren doesn’t ever take off his stupid dress-up costume and, rather than that making him a laughingstock, the men actually seem to be afraid of him, as though he is some sort of black-clad boogeyman. Hux hears their ghost stories about the sith: that even just the apprentices are powerful enough to kill a person from a galaxy’s distance away, that they must shed the blood of an innocent before beginning training, and other nonsense. He also hears reverential gossip about Ren himself: that he’s the ghost of Darth Vader himself, that beneath his mask is something so hideous that most men would go mad to view it, and the most troubling bit, that he’s come to the Finalizer to take control of the entire First Order, to rule over Hux and, someday, overthrow Snoke.

It’s not surprising that the troopers, whose lives are spent solely in the company of their peers, only venturing into the other reaches of space in order to subdue or kill, would be gullible and prone to this sort of childish nonsense. In a way, they still are children, having never reached the emotional maturity that comes with independence. He doesn’t blame the troopers. He blames Kylo Ren. 

He blames Kylo Ren for arguing about how many spies to send to Naboo, as if he has any concept of tactics of espionage! He blames Kylo Ren for force-choking Lambert until he loses consciousness, even if no permanent damage is done. He especially blames Kylo Ren for his damned continual presence. Does the man never sleep? If his helmet was larger, Hux would suspect him of being a Bith or a Gand, but his overall shape appears human. Perhaps there is some truth to the rumor that force users do not sleep, but instead, meditate for brief periods? Probably not, but yet there Ren is everytime he turns around. When he begins and ends his shift, Ren is there, silently watching others move around him as though time itself doesn’t affect him. 

Hux snaps one day, unable to bear it any longer. “Is there not something you should be doing?” he demands of the unspeaking ghoul haunting his command deck. 

“When Snoke commands me.”

“And in the meantime, you’re meant to just stand there taking up valuable space and oxygen?” Hux doesn’t often let himself lash out, even in this verbal manner. There are much more effective ways to cut a man down. Hux doesn’t want to be effective; he wants to be petulant and he seems to be succeeding at it.

Kylo Ren stands motionless, as usual, and Hux comes to believe that the immobility is in itself an answer, but then Ren asks, “Would you prefer me to stand somewhere else?”

It’s enough to drive a lesser person mad. 


	5. Kylo Finds Hux Intriguing

From the Ganymede’s cockpit, Kylo can confirm visually what his sensors have already told him, that he’s closing in on Takodana. It’s his first time off The Finalizer in over a month and he’s grateful for the opportunity to do anything useful. He’s to rendezvous with N’ktara Ren at a defunct Pakoukou shrine. It’s mostly an information exchange, but he’ll also serve in a small capacity as a secondary fighter should N’ktara require one. He’s hoping it will come to battle, regardless that such circumstances would render the assignment a waste of time. Kylo just has so much energy bottled up from standing around watching the soldiers go through their daily routines aboard the large floating battleship. 

Life aboard the Finalizer has been dull, but far from unpleasant. His quarters are small and have a ruthless efficiency-style of comfort to them. When he’d fled from the Jedi Temple during the night of his rebirth, he’d taken a bag with him of only the most basic of things, save for one item of misplaced sentimental value. Since then, Kylo hasn’t felt very inclined to saddle himself with more things that he might need to abandon in the future. But even this minimalist approach to objects has the three compartments in his quarters packed tightly. The appreciation that he has for the space is that it is his own, shared by neither apprentices nor tenuous allies. It’s hard enough to share a control deck with General Hux, who radiates a consistent low-level hatred at all times when Kylo is around, which given the circumstances of their deployment, must be exhausting.

He likes watching Hux though, trying to figure out what makes the general tick, and what makes him stand out so much from the other worker bees that flit through the hive of the ship. For starters, he’s less stoic than Kylo thinks of military personnel. Every emotion that Hux ever has broadcasts itself, illuminated like the 500-foot casino advertisements on Spira. Even if he doesn’t take action to the feelings, they’re right there for anyone, not just a force user, to read. His neck, ears, and cheeks turn red at the least provocation. When angry, Hux’s lips draw themselves so tight together that Kylo wonders if they’ll vanish entirely, crushed beneath their own weight. When smugly satisfied with himself, his nose goes higher, like a bird’s beak proudly full of a worm. And these reactions can come from the most mundane of interactions. Even signing a work order can be a drama holovid’s worth of physical responses. 

Despite this seeming flaw though, Hux runs a tight ship. He’s good at what he does. His men hate him, of course, as can be said of any good commander, but he isn’t seeking their approval anyway. His approval comes strictly from inside. Kylo’s seen happy pride cross his face as he meets or exceeds a personal goal. He doesn’t need soldiers to praise him. Kylo envies him that fiercely. Even now that he’s the Master of the Knights of Ren, he still feels desperate for a word of respect, of adulation, from Snoke. He tries so hard not for his own sake, like Hux does, but for others. 

Takodan’s environment is lush; trees, plants, and animals burst from every inch of its surface, but the Ganymede doesn’t require much room to land, and he doesn’t even need to seek out a port. He parks by a lake located not far from the shrine. He’d prefer to wait until he gets out of the cockpit to slip on his mask, but it’s raining and he wishes to avoid getting the smell of wet hair trapped with him inside the helmet. He climbs out of the craft, stretches his legs, always stiff from long trips in a ship so small. He watches the way that the rain makes the surface of the lake ripple, holds out a gloved hand and feels the weight of the fat droplets as they land. Takodan has amazing freshwater resources that are yet untapped. The whole planet seems paused in an unsustainable equilibrium, where there are people on it, but it hasn’t been plundered yet. Give it time and it will become as plucked clean as a beebleberry bunch in the paws of a bearded jax. 

He can sense N’ktara’s location, an unsurprising connection formed from their time training together under Snoke. No other knight can match Kylo for force power, but he feels like a sort of main hub for them when they’re near him, like he makes them stronger. The urge to reconnect with them is magnetic, so that even if he wasn’t already intending this meeting, his feet might carry him there anyway.

Pakoukou is a Mon Calamari god and so shrines in his honor are built either around or on water. This one is atop the water, but, in deference to its indigenous people, has a floating bridge that leads to it. Before stepping on the bridge, Kylo flexes his force powers. It’s overwhelming to sense the life force on a planet with so much variation in flora and fauna. In the force, even the bud of a plant has the amount of presence of a large beast. He feels all the essences dying and growing. It takes him several moments to filter out the non-sentient, to be able to focus on potential threats. The nearby population, just townsfolk, don’t seem to offer him any immediate threat. N’ktara inside the building could definitely be a threat, they’re as well-trained in combat as himself, but he’s looking for ambush. Finding nothing, he continues.

The bridge has the perfect height on the water, but it’s still unnerving to feel it dip slightly as he walks. No doubt it has technology that adapts to the rainy seasons, but its mechanics are invisible, making the bridge look as though it’s magically levitating, mere millimeters between the surface of the lake and the path his feet take. One of the double doors is slightly ajar, an invitation that he accepts.

N’ktara is a phorot, a lizard-descended people from an Outer Rim planet. Phorots prefer warm climates, never fidget, eat an exclusively carnivorous diet, have no gender, and stole their space travel technology long before they would have invented it for themselves. N,ktara themself, doesn’t trust members of other races (with a few exceptions), speaks softly, uses their tail to cheat at cards, and wears rings on each of their 16 fingers. 

The shrine’s main room of worship is circular and N’ktara stands dramatically in its center. “Kylo,” they say, dipping their helmet slightly in deference, but not subservience to his higher role in the Knights. 

“N’ktara,” he replies. He puts a hand on their shoulder, a gesture of camaraderie which they may or may not respond to. He knows well enough by now not to guess how they’ll react to anything. 

“The rendezvous is not scheduled for several hours.” Their way of letting Kylo know that he’s early. 

He’s not going to admit that he’s felt like a caged animal aboard The Finalizer; it’s never good to confess weaknesses to this group which has a… delicate loyalty. Instead, he nods, just acknowledging the early time without giving a reason for it. 

“I was planning to meditate until then.”

“I can join you,” he offers. It’s been far too long, months, since he’s meditated with another force user. The depth of the mind seems to take on new dimensions when it grafts to another’s. 

They consider the offer, sharing their thoughts with him, that they would hesitate to lose focus here, but since the contact won’t arrive for hours, there would be less risk involved. He offers his own thoughts, that they have a point, but they can control how far in they go, that they needn’t actually go into a trance which they would probably be inclined to do under less dangerous circumstances.

“I agree to your offer,” they say. “But, let us use the basement. There is a lockable hatch door and the stairs are in dangerous condition.”

“Sounds perfect,” he replies ironically. N’ktara doesn’t seem to catch it, but leads the way. He follows behind them and tries not to think for the thousandth time how useful it would be to have a tail. Jealousy is one of the weaker emotions for the darkside, because it is built around a deficiency in the user rather than a strength. Anger and hate, which Kylo has in spades, is much more potent. Still, he’s seen N’ktara use their tail for things as mundane as carrying an extra plate to wielding a lightsaber, though the latter was done quite poorly. “Have you still been practicing with your tail?” he asks.

The hatch that they open is a stone one, but mechanized to slide back and forth easily. Beneath the hatch is a set of wooden steps. As they’d warned, the steps look brittle and groan loudly under their feet. Should it collapse, it would be easy enough to jump the remaining distance to the floor, but it holds, complaining loudly about the chore. N’ktara force-slides the hatchway back shut after they are firmly on the damp stone and wood-mixed floor.

He now sees their mask by artificial fire light, projection flames in electronic sconces set on the wall. The entire shrine is built with a rustic ancient feel, though Kylo’s sure that the planet hasn’t even had inhabitants longer than a few centuries. Emperor Palpatine enslaved the Mon Calamari during his brief reign, so there had been no one to keep up temples on worlds within Empire influence during that time. Apparently, Takodan is not one of the higher priority worlds for the newly freed aquatic creatures to return to. 

He senses amusement from N’ktara at his question. His fascination with their tail has long been a source of teasing for them. “I’d be better off attempting to wield my saber with my toes,” they joke. “Still wishing you’d been born a phorot?”

Kylo removes his helmet. The moldy air smell hits him immediately, and he almost regrets the decision. He hates humidity for the way it sinks into the pores and the bones, the way it rots wood and bread. N’ktara follow suit as he replies. “I no longer seek to change the past.”

“That is an enviable mental state,” they say. Kylo denies the part of himself that objects to its veracity. “I would like to begin with our current assignments.”

Kylo removes one of his gloves, offers his naked hand, fingers pointed up towards the shrine above them, palm flat, to N’ktara. They respond in kind and he can feel the roughness of their scaled skin against his own. He’d preferred the cool touch to the warmer touch of the other knights’. Somehow it made it feel less intimate which is silly since their minds will delve more deeply together than their hands.

N’ktara’s mind is like a vast desert with huge rocks obscuring the landscape. They’ve got secrets, ones safely tucked behind boulders, but the thoughts and permitted memories roll along like sand pushed by a gentle wind. He sees N'ktara dangling from a tree branch in a dank swamp, awaiting a victim. He can feel their excitement, anticipation, and then finally their dark joy as they assassinate their intended target. He sees them on a battle cruiser, at first he thinks its The Finalizer, but no, just another of the same build. They’re listening to speeches, battle plans, watching as they destroy a vessel that has gotten too close to their mining operations. He feels their frustration, being a useless observer. He can relate more than they know. There are other recent missions, and he takes down the important details, but lets most of it drift by. He’s getting an overall feel for what Snoke has the other knights doing, feels relieved that N’ktara, at least, is also unutilized for long stretches of time. He almost uncovers one of their secret rocks by accident, stumbling upon some thoughts during a kill. Something about a hatchling. He withdraws himself from it quickly, remembering acutely that this is voluntary information and they owe him nothing of their personal self.

‘You’re attracted to the General.’ N’ktara thinks, observation sounding judgment-free. 

In his surprise, Kylo opens his eyes. They still have their nictating membranes shielding their vision, so they probably don’t notice. He settles back down, feeling their unspoken assurance that this is between them. Just as he wouldn’t trust any of the knights with his life, he doesn’t trust any with his feelings. Nonetheless, he’s risked his life beside them many times, and they know his feelings, because it’s nearly impossible to train in the force with someone and come away defended.

‘His view of the world is similar to my own. I sense a kindred spirit there.’ It’s a large confession, for himself more than for them. N’ktara doesn’t care, but Kylo keeps trying to put his thoughts about Hux in the right context.

‘Or a mate.’ 

Suddenly, Kylo wishes he hadn’t been so respectful of their thoughts. He almost feels like overturning information about the hatchling, just to strike back. 

N’ktara plays a memory for him, Snoke’s voice. Just hearing it, even as a secondary voice pulled from the past, strikes fear in him, intimidation. “Emotional attachments can be exploited.”

Snoke wasn’t wrong. Kylo has only been able to see the lingering affection he feels for Ben’s mother as a weakness, one that he hides away deeper than perhaps anything else, deeper than N'ktara is capable of finding. ‘The Supreme Leader is correct, as always.’

The rest of the meditation continues uneventfully, at least compared to their poking about in his growing fondness for Hux, and they finish with plenty of time to prepare for the contact’s arrival. His worry gets sets aside easily enough, mind disciplined enough to focus on the task at hand when it counts, though perhaps not disciplined enough to heed his master’s advice about attachments.


	6. Ben Visits the Shrink

“And how many times has he shown up in one of your dreams?” asks Dr. Thayer.

“Oh, uh, let’s see, four, I think?” It’s hard to imagine that it’s been so few times, that more of his dreams haven’t included the space soldier with the cold green but bloodshot angry eyes and short red hair covered neatly by a little cap. He knows these details because nearly every moment of his waking life has been spent replaying those four dreams over and over in his head. It’s good that Ben’s shrink takes emergency appointments.

“And how often would you say that he comes into your head during the day, when you’re awake?”

Ben laughs nervously. “Um, that’s actually why I called. See, I keep having things happen and I’ll think, “Hux would like that,” or “that would really piss Hux off.” It scared him when he realized he’d done that, which is why he’s sitting in Dr. Thayer’s office alternating between looking at her, the little bookshelf of psychology books with titles like The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma and The Upside of Your Darkside, and the little white noise machine that chugs away in the corner providing privacy when a patient cries.

“What kind of things piss Hux off?” she asks as though it’s perfectly natural to inquire about the pet peeves of imaginary dream people. 

He can’t help but smile, not that she’s asking, but at the memories that flit across his head. “Everything pisses him off. A change to his schedule, things not having a back up plan, just like a bunch of things. Even the way that I talk to him.”

She nods. “It seems that you enjoy making him angry?” 

Usually when Ben is his nightmare alter ego, all he can feel is pure rage, grief, isolation, things like that. This is the first time that Kylo Ren has ever felt, well “tickled” by something. And he feels tickled by this Hux guy. The guy just tries so hard to keep everything operating a certain way and then Ben comes along and messes that up. He tries to be stoic and not react to Ben’s childishness, but he keeps getting drawn in anyway, and Ben loves it. “Well, dream me does. I…” he hesitates here, because this is embarrassing to admit even to a shrink, whose job it is to talk down nut jobs like himself. “I think that dream me has a kind of crush on him. Like, I think I’m pissing him off on purpose cause I like him.” It was flirting, but like, grade school I-knocked-your-books-down-cause-I-think-you’re-cute flirting. Why would a badass space warlord need to get a guy’s attention like that? Well, that’s because Ben isn’t actually a badass space warlord. He’s a regular dude who can’t handle any grownup situation the proper way because he’s emotionally stunted by the dreaded “daddy issues.” He begins to wonders if maybe Kylo Ren has daddy issues too, but is interrupted by Dr. Thayer’s next question.

“Is homosexual attraction an expected response for you?” she asks, clinically.

“Oh,” Ben smiles. “Yeah. I guess I’ve never talked about, like, my love life with you.”

Dr. Thayer is young, probably younger than him. She always has her hair in some form of braid, usually up. It always looks picture perfect, like the chicks on the covers of bridal magazines. He’s lucky if he runs a comb through his before coming here. It’s the way it should be, probably, her being all professional and putting time into her looks, and him performing the smell test on one of his shirts before throwing it on. She works for him, after all, not the other way around, but he does try and please her because, well,  _ daddy issues _ . 

“You haven’t much,” she corrects. “During your initial intake, I believe you mentioned an ex named Daisy? And more recently, you got asked to dinner by a work client?”

“Oh, Daisy isn’t an ex-girlfriend. She’s an ex-friend. When I first moved out here from California, she was one of my coworkers in the bar I worked at. She was more trouble than it was worth.” He laughs at his own description. “That’s probably why you thought she was an ex-girlfriend. God knows she was as much upkeep as one.”

Dr. Thayer nods. “Gotchya! My mistake. Well, back to this Hux. Does he remind you of anyone in your waking life?”

One of the things that he’d liked upon initially seeing this shrink is that she uses phrases like “waking life” rather than “real life.” She says that she doesn’t believe that what people experience when they’re asleep should be written off as unreal, because for a time, for them, they are. She’s also able to write prescriptions, which is nice, because he now has a bottle of “only in emergencies” sedatives. It’s a small, non-lethal sized bottle, which she probably doesn’t think that he’s noticed. He’d almost said something to that effect, but there’s not really a good way to tell someone you aren’t suicidal without them immediately assuming that you’re lying since you brought it up.

“No, I’ve never met anyone that even looks like him let alone acts like him. He’s got a space stick shoved so far up his ass, I’m surprised it doesn’t come out of the top of his head.” God, he’d love to be able to say that to Hux. It’s too bad that when he’s asleep, he isn’t really him. That doesn’t strike him as something that Kylo Ren would say. Maybe he would, but he’d probably say it more eloquently than Ben could. Kylo Ren chooses his words much more carefully because he doesn’t talk as much. Perhaps if Ben began to wear a mask, he would start feeling less like the blabbering dork he is. “It would be fun to tell him that.”

“Your dynamic sounds a bit antagonistic.”

Ben nods. 

“Do you think that could be because of some traits that you do or don’t share?”

In any other situation, he would just say “Maybe” but this is therapy, where you’re supposed to look inward. It’s hard for Ben to look that way because he likes his surface better than his insides. He’s like one of those needlepoints where one side looks great but the backside is all messed up, just threads going here and there and little knots and stuff. Do the two of them have any common traits? To answer that, he needs clarification. “Do you mean me and Hux or… dream me and Hux?” He’s told her his nightmare version’s name before but it feels like betrayal to say it out loud, like he’s ratting Kylo out.

“Either,” she says. 

“Well, dream me and Hux do, I think.” His answers are slow, as he tries to look outside of Kylo Ren when he’s so used to looking from the inside. “They’re both pretty big on power, like maybe they’ve both been hurt in the past and try to keep control of everything so it doesn’t happen again.” 

“It sounds like you’re trying to psychoanalyze him,” she reminds. “What if we set aside any assumptions about guarding mechanisms. Try, instead, to look at things that you know.”

Right. He’s been in therapy too long. “Yeah, maybe I’m guessing about why, but he does like to keep control. He gets mad when I...when dream I… I mean, me... changes up his routines. I’m not sure if dream me cares about stuff like that. I think he cares a lot about how others see him. That’s part of why he wears the mask.”  
“Is this Hux you’re talking…”

“No, I meant Kylo Ren. I don’t think Hux cares too much about what others think of him, as long as shit gets done. He really wants his government to rule everything and he wants to be the head honcho helping them do it. I think he’s afraid that Kylo will mess that up.”

She tilts her braided head, tipping him off to the fact that he’s used Kylo Ren’s name twice in a short period of time. He’s always switching between first and third person with his nightmare self, usually because there’s some things that he can’t see himself doing and so he puts up a barrier between them. He really has been in therapy too long.

“But, I don’t really know Hux very well. That’s kind of why I’ve been picking on him. I want to know more about him and he seems kind of robotic unless he’s angry.”

“Do you find that this approach works for you in your waking life?”

Ben lets his goofiest grin loose, the one that you can tell what he looked like when he was five to see. “No! No! I mean, when I was a kid maybe.”

She laughs. “Okay, so how does Ben generally initiate relationships, romantic or otherwise.”

“Does it sound bad if I say small talk at bars?” He winces a bit to hear it. He’s not the best at dating. Most of his experience has been anywhere from a one-night stand to about two months or so. It’s little wonder that he hasn’t brought up any exes to his shrink when he has so few that have mattered. 

“Not at all,” she assures. “People meet in all kinds of ways. How do your relationships tend to progress after that?”

“That doesn’t sound any better,” he warns. “I guess they don’t usually. Just, his place or mine most of the time. I mean, sometimes we do a real date. It doesn’t usually last very long though.”

“Would you say these relationships are predetermined to have a short lifespan or that one of you ends it prematurely?”

God, she’s so good at putting things. It’s like everything has meaning to her and not just in your standard shrinky “gotchya!” sort of way, but like, predetermined lifespans makes his brief interactions with other dudes sound so much more official, more significant than they really are. “The former, most of the time. We kind of get what we came for.” He winces a bit at the double entendre but she has the grace to ignore it. “I guess the ones that go for longer, I think the longest was maybe not quite three months? That was the guy saying he felt like he didn’t really know me and that it was annoying him. He said that I was never going to actually open up to him.”

“Do you feel like that was a correct assessment of the situation?”

“Not really. I mean, just because I’m not sure there’s much more to me than he saw. He was probably mostly pissed that I wouldn’t let him sleep over. But, I didn’t want him to be there while I was freaking out because of a nightmare or something.”

She types a few things in her laptop, a sign that either he’s said something significant, or that there hour is nearly done. Ben pulls out his phone. It might be both.

“We’ve covered a lot of new ground today, Ben. Do you feel like we’ve addressed the issue that’s concerning you?”

She’s given him a lot to think about, that’s for sure. But she didn’t answer the one question that scared him into making the appointment. He’s pretty sure he’s not going to get the response that he wants to hear, but he brings it up anyway. “It’s not normal for me be thinking about Hux like he’s a real person right? I mean, not when I’m awake. That seems like, like I’m getting worse and not better?”

She sets her laptop aside and leans her body towards him, unspoken language one of comforting, concern, and openness. “I think you’re seeing a change in your nightmares. For the first time, you’re finding a positive element to them. It seems premature to decide whether that change is a positive or a negative, but that is a call that only you will be able to make. You told me that the character doesn’t remind you of anyone in your waking life. Maybe take some time before we meet up next to think about if that still holds true.”

“So, you’re not worried?” he asks.

“No, I’m not worried.”

It’s super amazing how much that relieves him. He exhales loudly and it makes her smile, that he’d actually been holding his breath about it. It might not mean that he’s crazy, at least not more crazy than he already is. It’s just different. Heck, different might be good. He might be turning these nightmares into dreams. Well, Hux might be.


	7. Dom Gets a Job Offer

The carpeted hallway that runs from the main cubicle floor to the dinette is, at present, one of the dimly lit metal walkways that connect throughout The Finalizer. He’s left his coat on today, so that he can look over his shoulder, pretend to see the patch there. He can’t quite remember the details of the symbol, so he tries to invent one in his head only to discover that he’s just stolen the Deathly Hallows symbol. Fine, he’s not pretending to be a creative genius. The Harry Potter symbol will do for now, because he is General Hux. 

In the 10 am meeting, he watches his coworkers, troopers in slacks and button-up shirts, and he considers assigning them to tasks, maybe sending out a full battalion to secure a new base, or ordering them to jettison one of their own with the charge of treachery. They aren’t discussing bottom lines or mergers, but the number of fighter pilots shot down last week and the construction of the most powerful weapon ever conceived. It makes the time pass quicker than usual, this daydreaming, to the extent that he’s surprised when his co-workers begin to queue up at the door to leave. Some are discussing going for an early lunch. Oddly, one tries to invite him.

“Dom, you in on this?” she asks jovially. The rest aren’t really paying attention, too busy chittering or gathering up their things, but he has no doubt that they would be curious about her decision to include him. His disinterest in joining them is immeasurable so he replies, “No, thanks. I had a late breakfast.” 

“I was hoping to talk to you now anyway,” says Reilly, standing next to the unrolled projection screen at the arbitrary front of the room. 

“Of course,” says Dom with a tiny nod. They wait for the room to empty and then Reilly ominously shuts the door. Though empty save for him and Reilly, the room still smells like coffee and various degrees of lethargy and boredom. Awkwardly looking between a seat and Reilly, he asks, “Should I sit down for this?”

Reilly shrugs. “This won’t take long.”

“Okay.” Dom is a great worker. He’s never in his life been fired, but even he’s made a bit nervous by that answer. It wouldn’t be unheard of for even a great worker to be let go if the company needed to make some cuts and they were one of the most recent employees hired. 

Reilly laughs. “Don’t look so nervous. I’m not firing you or anything!” He leans his sizeable frame on the top of the meeting table, one cheek squishing down next to a ring of condensation. “Do you remember when you came to me last month about wanting a lead position?”

It’s been less than two weeks, and Dom still acutely feels the sting of the words spoken then, but he nods because he gets that for Reilly, it hadn’t been one of the most depressing days in his life. 

“Well, I talked to Mel Simpson about it. He said there’s an opening for an assistant manager position at our branch in Boston.” The smile across his supervisor’s face nearly smug. Obviously, he’s delighting in bringing this information, but Dom isn’t even sure what to make of it.

“Boston, America?” asks Dom, both because he’s genuinely surprised and because Reilly had paused to allow the question.

“Right. Well, I wanted to run it by you before I went to bat for you. I know you’re pretty eager to move up in the ranks, but that’s also quite the relocation. Figure you might want to run the possibility by your family first, sleep on it a bit. Now, I can’t guarantee that the position will be yours, but there’s no point in starting the process if you’d rather stay here anyway.”

Assistant manager of a branch isn’t bad for having been with First Order for less than a year. It’s not exactly his end goal, but it has a much better ring to it than ‘maybe in a few years you can have a bigger cubicle.’ 

“Please do start the process. I’ll take it if the company thinks I’m a good fit for the position.”

Reilly chuckles and slaps his thigh in what Dom instantly thinks of as hillbilly, but he’d better get used to that if he’s heading to America. “Dom, you are always so professional! You sure you don’t want to take some time? Maybe run it by a girlfriend or your folks or something?”

Dom shakes his head. “No, I’m sure. No need to run it by anyone.”

“Alrighty then,” says Reilly, pushing himself up from the table. “I’ll let Mel know and I’ll put in the official recommendation. If you have any professional letters of reference you want to add to the kitty, go ahead and get those to me whenever you can.”

“I provided two upon my hire than I can reprint. If you think more will help, I can reach out to other former coworkers.”

“Just send me those. I’ll pass them along to Mel.” he starts to leave the meeting room but stops and adds, “I hope you get it, Dom.”

Dom thanks him but as he’s standing there considering the ramifications of that wish, it occurs to him that Riley very well could have been saying he’s looking forward to putting an ocean between them. 

 

 

By the time he wraps up work for the day, Dom’s already researched work Visas, moving and storage costs, the latter because he doesn’t plan to stay in America forever, and researched housing costs in Boston. Americans rent out their flats on the monthly so his first response of sticker shock turns out to be unwarranted. He doesn’t print his findings, not on the company dime, but he does save the information in cloud storage.

The logistics of the move shouldn’t be too tricky, not for someone as logically minded as him. He has already started a spreadsheet. He’ll be sure not to omit any steps or overlook any pertinent information. The personal ramifications might be trickier. He doesn’t know anything about Boston except for the tea party and the Red Sox. The things that he knows about America itself are far from endearing. As for the family that Reilly was encouraging him to consult, well his one family member rubs against his damp pant legs upon his return home, leaving a trail of wispy orange hair in her wake. 

Dom scoops her up into his arms, an act that she resists because she insists, vehemently, that cuddles are to be initiated by her and her alone. “Hey,” he says sharply. “How would you feel about living in America?”

Millicent pauses in her struggles at his words. She looks at him in shocked annoyance and then lets her claws loose, attempting to get him to drop her (which works) but not to actively harm him (which fails). He swears at the little newly formed perforations that stand out pink millimeters away from his mostly healed but very itchy wound. “Should I leave you here then?” he asks her. She’s grooming herself, washing away all evidence of human molestation. “I have half a mind to do just that!” He takes off his coat. “I could get a dog instead, a big dumb beast who would love for me to play with it.” 

It’s an idle threat. Dom is a cat person without the time necessary to devote to a dog. Plus, he loves Millicent, even if the love effort is primarily one-sided. Frankly, he’s had human relationships like that as well and none of those men were better looking than Millicent. 

As Dom cooks dinner for himself, a quick chicken stir-fry that is more utilitarian than delicious, he tells Millicent about the potentially pending job offer. He pitches it to her as a new experience, as though it isn’t terrifying that they’ll be so far away. He says that it’s practically unheard of to have reached a branch assistant manager position so quickly, though he may be making that up, and that he expects to be able to overthrow the current manager there in no time, even coming up with some highly illegal ways of doing so. He has her full attention and he pretends that it isn’t just her hopes that he will drop some of the chicken, but that she’s following the conversation and has an opinion on their upcoming relocation. 

He considers the fact that she’s the only person he has ever felt himself be so fanciful around. She never judges his words, not even when he’d told her about the space dream and how happy it had made him. “Do you think that maybe I’ll have the space dream tonight?”

He’s had good luck - six dreams so far. It’s nothing short of amazing. The only time in his life he’s ever had a recurring dream, it’s been of the ‘naked in class’ variety, certainly never with any sort of continuity to them. The last few introduced a sort of antagonist character, a Kylo Ren. Dom has mixed feelings about the character who is essentially that one annoying coworker whom everyone celebrates the transfer of out of the department. Certainly, his dream self is driven crazy by Ren, but when Dom tries to identify individual things that could cause that, he comes up empty-handed. Of course, he’s not exactly in his most capable frame of mind while he’s asleep. He does desperately hope every night that he’ll return to the futuristic dream world, wishes that he knew the special combination to summon them. He tries not to allow himself to entertain the thought of just staying in bed, sleeping constantly, to increase his chances. 

Some chicken does “accidentally” make its way to the floor, but the small piece doesn’t stop Millicent from begging for more next to him as he peruses the internet for more information about the move. It’s pretty miserably cold in Boston, from the look of it. Luckily, England and the US seem to have similar animal control laws, so it’s not impossible to ship cats. Hell, from what he sees, she won’t even need to be in quarantine. She’s going to hate that trip! He hopes that Americans know little enough about their own history that he won’t be too shunned for having a British accent in a place renowned for its act of colonial rebellion.

Ben stays up a bit too late looking at all the odds and ends about the move. He’s excited and nervous and when he climbs into bed, he’s convinced that he’s going to be awake all night going over everything. Instead, he gets his wish tonight, as though asking it out loud to Millicent made it happen, and does indeed return in his dreams to his spaceship, The Finalizer.


	8. Hux Goes to the Gym

It’s been one of those days. It’s rare for him to have one like this. The only rarer type of day is probably the one where he lies on his cot and watches holo-vids or reads for pleasure all day long. That has happened three times that Hux can recall. The day like today, where he contemplates resigning his command, taking the credits he’s managed to stash away from the less than meager pittance he’s paid, buying a little house on a planet no one has ever heard of where he can curl up with a mug of tea and some sort of furred pet and just imagine that he is the only being capable of speech in the galaxy. This has happened somewhere in the vicinity of twelve times, which is still very rare as his life has seen 35 years worth of days. 

If it’s possible for brains to get cramps, then he has them, because this isn’t quite a headache so much as it as soreness from overuse. He is quite used to being the one that the men turn to when something goes wrong; this is, in fact, his job. He thrives on being useful. But, when every question is a stupid one, when every mechanical glitch can’t be fixed, when it’s somehow three hours past the end of his shift and he hasn’t even gotten to the fourth item on his agenda, then that elation at being the engine that keeps this ship going turns into something sour and angry. 

He rubs at the little groove that shows up when he’s either thinking very hard, which he has been, or when he’s angry, which he is. Hux isn’t a vain man, but he is not looking forward to seeing that divot deepen and obtain permanence on his face like it had on Brendol Hux’s. There are many ways that Armitage attempts to be like his father, appearance is not one. 

“Look, if  _ you _ can’t figure out, then perhaps you should find someone more mentally equipped to handle the task!” he snaps at the engineer before him.

The engineer, Thompson, opens his mouth, then shuts it. He’s used to everyone in his department being beneath him, people that he can yell at. When he opens it again, it’s in an artificially calm way. “It’s more of a matter of not having the right tool for the job. I put it in a request for that weeks ago, but there’s been a coup on Corellia and we’re delaying a trip there.”

If The First Order had the sway (or the funds or the manpower) that the Empire had, this wouldn't be an issue. Hux and the others working so diligently to restore order to the galaxy are constantly having to meet this hindrance head on. They are not the Empire. Not yet. 

He again brings his gloved hand up to rub his forehead. “I’m sure there are other planets where it can be found, Thompson.” 

“Would you sign another requisition order for one from Kuat?” Thompson asks hopefully. 

“Of course!” Hux snaps. “We don’t just let the ship fall apart around us because one planet is having problems with its government! Write it up and show it to me tomorrow.”

The man nods and says “Yessir,” before walking away.

Hux has officially had it with this day. He is tired of the hand-holding and the idiots whose hands need held. “Yaaja, I’m leaving you in charge.”

“Yessir,” answers Yaaja. Technically it’s been her shift for the last three hours, but ranking being what it is, she’d have taken a backseat to any orders that he’d be giving.

Time to go burn some of this anger.

 

The Finalizer was never meant to be a luxury starship. It’s a battle cruiser, armed to its teeth. There aren’t a lot of leisure activities on board. So, when one finds downtime, not that Hux often does, residents tend to gravitate to one of the many gyms/sports courts on board. The one closest to the command center is unofficially used only by higher ranking officers, never by just grunt troopers. So, at the moment, it’s just him and Officer Brite. Two people in a large area packed with machines of all varieties. Options include cardio, strength, and neural training and adjacent courts for any manner of group games. 

At first, Hux, wearing stiff grey pants with a stretchy waistband and a grey short-sleeved shirt, runs in place just to get his heart going, send it a message that it’s about to work out. Then, he walks over to the wall with holes going all the way up to the ceiling. He grabs the two climbing pegs and sets to work scaling one hole at a time. It requires incredible upper body strength that Hux tries to have. It’s important to stay in top condition in all manners, but it’s hard for him to find time to come here. He only goes as often as he does in order to stay battle ready. Coming down here feels too much like play and play doesn’t earn anyone command of starships. When he reaches the top, it’s just an easy jump down to the mats. By that point, his shoulders are shaking and his forehead has burst into a sweat. His hands are sweaty too but he hadn’t lost his hold. Good, it’s a good place to start a workout.

Then, striding in as arrogantly as possible from inside his dead dictator costume, Kylo Ren appears in the gym. He looks in surprise at Hux, maybe because he’s never seen him here, maybe because he’s wearing normal clothing, or maybe because that clothing is sweaty. Whatever reason, Hux feels judged and resents it. After all, it is Kylo Ren who has come in dressed in full Kylo Ren regalia. “Are you planning on working out in your mask?” Hux asks, feeling more impertinent than usual, loosened up by the bodily exertion. 

The mask looks around, notices that there is no one else but Hux, Brite having already headed out. Then, the mask looks for a long while at Hux. Again, he feels like he is being judged, or maybe studied. It’s hard to say when he can’t actually see Ren’s face. “Perhaps a game of goothball?” Hux asks mockingly. The idea of Ren backhanding a goothball, racquet in hand, all while wearing his long black robes and helmet would make a less jaded man laugh. Though, it does almost make him smile, an unaccustomed feature on his face.

The mask nods. “Yes, but it’s been sometime since I’ve played.”

Hux blinks. ‘I was joking,’ almost comes out of his mouth, but he waits, holds it there to see what Ren does next. 

Ren sits down on a bench and his large hands fiddle with his mask. Hux inhales quickly, unable to not find this impending reveal as terribly exciting. Will his crew’s conjectures be found accurate? Will he be covered in scars to the point where all that can be seen is one hideous morose eye? Probably not. Will he be an alien so ugly that to view him causes madness? Also, probably not. But, then, what? What is underneath the mask? The mask comes off.


	9. Dom Goes to the Gym

Slowly, Dom’s eyelids rise up like blinds in the morning letting in the sun on a beautiful day. Most of his face is pressed flat into his mattress. He stares at the cream colored sheet beneath his face. Kylo Ren is beautiful. He closes his eyes again, recalls with the perfect clarity of a mind still half asleep the full lips, the large nose, the perfect black hair that haloes around his face, the small chin, the ears, huge though mostly hidden by the hair, the eyes, sullen and resigned, expectant, like he’d been waiting for Hux to say something cutting like usual. And the lips again, because even in just his imagination they deserve an encore. 

Oh, why did his subconscious make him so beautiful? So Dom’s type? He tries desperately to take a mental polaroid, not wanting to lose a single detail of the image. His eyebrows had been black, thick, but not bestially so. His eyes had been on the smaller size, but he’d been too distracted by the insecurity, the openness in them to notice. Had the earlobes attached? Dom thinks so, but isn’t sure. Were there piercings in them? Damn, he wish he’d had longer before the surprise of seeing Kylo Ren, leader of the Knights of Ren, Sith Apprentice to Master Snoke as just a guy, a good-looking, 30-something, expressive-eyed, luscious-lipped guy, had pushed him that last bit of the way towards wakefulness that he’d already been fighting. 

And why did his hair looks so perfect after having been in a fucking helmet for hours? Dom’s hair had never looked like that, even after a visit to the salon! 

Dom rubs his face into his pillow. He’s officially become so lonely that he’s invented an imaginary love interest for himself. “Bugger,” he whispers sadly. The pillow muffles the sound, but not enough to keep Millicent from hearing, apparently, for she appears like a loud hungry genie on the bed next to him. When he doesn’t respond to her meows, she pokes at the back of his head. “Leave me to die alone in peace, you needy trollop!” She returns to meowing. 

He pulls his head up and looks at her. “Why did I make him so lovely?”

Millicent doesn’t answer. 

“Oh God!” He pulls the blanket up over his head incidentally dislodging the cat and returns his face to his pillow. “I  _ am _ going to die alone! I’m going to die an old cat gentleman!” He knows that there’s actually something potentially worse that could happen. He could just sleep all the time hoping to initiate a relationship with an imaginary space serial murderer who wears a silly getup over his emotive eyes and kissable lips. He imagines the padded walls now, the psychologists speaking about him as though he isn’t there, “The patient lives mostly in his own head now. We wheel him out to the gardens for brunch but he fully believes himself to be on a spaceship. He becomes violent when we attempt to wake him.”

In the dream though, Dom didn’t feel happy there either. It’s weird that there’s that disconnect. When Dom wakes up from a dream about Hux, he feels charged up with the importance of the position, the fulfillment of working hard towards a worthwhile goal. However, when he  _ is _ Hux, he’s stressed out, unhappy about everything but the cause. Everything is about the next moment, never about the current one. If Dom did go mad and reside in his dreams forever, it might give him a purpose, but it wouldn’t make him less alone or any happier.

Dom remembers what it felt like to scale the wall of the gym as Hux. He’s certainly never had upper strength like that. It makes sense that in space, they would need to work harder to keep their muscles toned. They wouldn’t have to worry about the muscle loss from zero gravity, but the long periods of inactivity in between missions would probably take its toll on both the cardio and the muscle systems. He’d felt high from the exercise. That was probably the only reason why he’d been taunting Ren, not expecting Ren to join them. If Dom had kept sleeping, would they have played a game of goothball together? He has it nebulously in his head that the game is like racquetball but different, maybe having holes and colors? It’s hard to remember and he doesn’t want to waste any spare memories on the trivial aspects of the dream. But, would Ren have stripped down then? Maybe shed down to just the black pants beneath his robes? How odd would that have looked? Kylo Ren, a normal dude at the gym?

Dom looks at the clock. He’s woken up an hour before he needs to get up for work, but he doesn’t feel like trying to go back to sleep. He wants to scale a wall. He wants to be more than himself. “Right,” he announces to the world. Millicent, who hasn’t gone far from the side of the bed, tears off to the kitchen assuming that he’s just said “breakfast.” And why can’t she have breakfast now? Just because it isn’t quite the time he feeds her, that doesn’t mean that he can’t, doesn’t mean that the world will end if he feeds her early. Just thinking this chaotic thought makes him a tad uncomfortable, like he’s just announced that he’s made it his goal for the day to rob a bank. 

He looks at himself in the rather inappropriate full-length loo mirror, inappropriate because it looks over not just the sink area, but the toilet as well. The face he sees staring back at him looks more innocent than he often feels, but he likes what he sees in the eyes this morning. The dreams have this utterly ridiculous effect on him. It’s like walking into a motivational poster.

“Hey Millicent!” he calls out. Sure enough, her orange highness appears expectantly. “I’m going to the gym.”

 

 

His flat is a touch on the fancy side, which he hadn’t really needed but it was offering such good deals since the building had just reopened, he couldn't pass it by. Plus, he’s not that many stops away from his work. When they’d tried to sell him on the amenity of having a gym in the building, he’d scoffed. It wasn’t that he was a lardass or anything like that, but some nights he only has enough time to shove dinner in his mouth before having to get to bed to get ready to go to work and do it all over again. He’s a busy, professional man. Also, he’s a bit on the scrawny side. Always has been. There’s no point in him trying to deny it to preserve his ego. He could spend all bloody day in a gym and he’d still come out of it looking like the stereotypical ginger with sand in his face at a beach. But he’s not here to try and change his appearance. He’s here because it had felt good to do it in the dream. 

It takes a good five minutes just to find the electronic key card that permits him entrance to the gym. He never thought he’d need it, so he’d stuffed it in his leasing packet. Luckily, he keeps meticulous records and finds it under the “Housing” file section in a white formerly sealed welcome packet. It works when he pushes it against the black pad next to the door. Then, he’s in the gym and completely lost. Not literally, of course. The room, despite the office manager’s ravings, is no bigger than the average family den. But he doesn’t actually know what to start with. There’s no peg wall, but that had seemed beyond his current capabilities anyway. There are two treadmills, one stationary bike, one complex looking weight machine, a row of dumbbells of varying weights, a standard weight bench with giant free weights already hung up, and a rowing machine that looks like it’s seen better days. 

Dom’s in great luck that there are no other residents in the gym because he feels so awkward. He tries out each type of machine. He’s tentative and unsure. He reads the instructions on the fancy weight machine. It can be used for so many different exercises! He runs through, picture by picture, testing it out, seeing where his starting weights are for the different exercises and he jots the numbers down on his phone. He enjoys some more than others. The treadmill can get pretty fast and he likes the resounding of his sneakers on the conveyer belt. The stationary bike pinches his balls and he uses that for the shortest amount of time. 

He’s so lost in play that he stays too long, nearly 15 minutes past when he should already be on his way to work! He hasn’t worked up a sweat really, but there would be no way on Earth he would touch all that used equipment without a quick shower. It’s the oddest feeling. He’s standing under the water, maybe a touch too hot, but it’s winter and that’s a minor indulgence, and he knows that he’s running late, but he doesn’t feel like the world will come crashing down because of it. He’s usually early, so this might put him on time, but it could make him late and still, he’s fretting about it in a small, restrained way. 

Even on the train, which is usually such a sad place for him, such a shining example of the hopelessness of his future, he keeps his cool. He’s not tapping his foot desperately willing the train to go faster, to transcend the limitations as physics. He’s just googling exercises that can be done on the machines available to him at his flat’s gym. There’s still enough of his usual uptightness to leap to his feet like a cat chewing an electrical cord when his stop arrives and it does bring a great deal of relief to have made it less than ten minutes late. Considering his lollygagging in the shower, it could have been a lot worse. 

Throughout the day, Dom behaves in a manner consistent with all the other ‘useless’ employees. He looks up the cultural differences of living in America. Every article mentions how he’ll need to have a car because things are so much more spread out in America. That’s consistent with how he thinks of the country. Dom finds the thought rather exciting, not being at the whim of a transit schedule, though he hadn’t been that great of a driver when he’d taken the classes years ago. As a matter of fact, he remembers his father’s great disappointment to find that he wasn’t immediately Dale Earnhardt. 

Dom also continues his exercise research. He finds proper forms for the strength training exercises - though it seems that these are more necessary for the free weights than the machines, which are geared towards the uninitiated. He finds some routines, but Dom figures he’ll come up with his own in time, maybe just haphazardly float through different exercises as he did this morning. He may be working towards some undefined goal, but he’s in no rush to get there.

He fritters away the day this way. Oh, he does some work, of course, the things that can’t wait, but overall, he absolutely has not earned his wages for the day. The slacking increases his father’s voice in his head, but he resolves to return to being exemplary tomorrow. Today was a celebration, a celebration of Dom looking to the future, not with grim determination, but with a playful optimism. 


	10. Ben Reflects on the Goothball Game

Like most people, Ben likes Christmas a touch more than most of the other holidays. While Halloween is a contender for best holiday ever (who wouldn’t love the dressing up, eating candy, and watching Jason Voorhies knock off horny teenagers?), there’s something undeniably magical about Christmas with its bright lights, irreproducible optimism, and all the people that suddenly want to feed him. He’s mostly enjoying some icing with a bit of sugar cookie underneath when his co-worker Juan asks him what he’s doing for Christmas. “Well,” he starts, a bit of flaky green icing falling out of his mouth. He finishes chewing before answering, trying not to smile at the amusement his clumsiness causes. “I’ve had four people invite me to have Christmas dinner with their families and two for Christmas Eve. I told them all probably, so I think I’m not gonna need to eat again until New Year’s.”

Juan laughs. “Well, I’ll toss my hat into the ring as well, if you want to visit with my family during your Christmas Dinner spree.”

Ben smiles and nods. “I’ll probably show up.”

“At this point, you’re going to need to be like Santa yourself, hitting all the places in one night. And you’ll look like him by the end.”

The little kitchenette in Empire Glass is seldom used. It’s the cleanest room in the factory by far, kept up mostly by the secretaries out front. They’ve attached little construction paper Christmas trees and Santas to the fronts of the cabinet doors. The plate from which Ben had grabbed his icing disc has a sign reading “EAT ME!” propped against it. Since he’s on the road for his job, Ben doesn’t bring in lunch, opting instead for fast food.

Ben looks at the plate. “I’ll take a couple to Gwen. I’m hitting her stop today.”

Juan is lead production manager in the factory, so while he doesn’t go out to the different customers like Ben, he at least knows their names. “I’ve heard she’s kind of a bitch,” he suggests lightly.

Ben laughs. “Yeah, I think she’d say that’s true. She probably hates sugary stuff too.” He doesn’t say it, because he doesn’t want it getting back around to the gal at the front desk who made them, but these cookies are pretty bad and probably wouldn’t appeal to even the sweetest teeth. He’s actually thinking he’ll make it look like they’re more popular than they are if he takes some to Gwen. She can chuck ‘em if she wants and with the baker none the wiser. “She’s pretty awesome.”

“One of these days, I’ll ride along with you on deliveries. Then I’ll be able to put some faces to the names.”

“Speaking of… I’d better get going.” Ben wipes at the corners of his mouth with the back of his hand. He’ll peek in his rearview mirror and make sure he got it all. It’s good enough for now though. “They’ve had me loaded up since 9.”

“Oh right,” says Juan. “You’re working half days this week.”

“Quarter days, really.” He’d come in at 10, four hours later than he usually does. Shipping is putting the longer distance drives together, only one shipment out to Taunton in two weeks. Even with how long they’re waiting for that trip, there’s still not that many units to take out there. Not surprising since it’s the day before Christmas eve. Soon, sales associates will be sneaking downstairs while their kids are asleep and packing the underside of trees with presents and installers will make their way around rich neighborhoods with their church groups singing carols. Productive life will come to a screeching halt while everyone re-enacts generation-old traditions. 

“Anyway, Merry Christmas! I’m off!” Ben says, snapping out of his holiday reverie. He snatches up some cookies in a white napkin and makes his way to the truck.  

 

 

When Ben drives, he usually listens to music. He likes to sing along loudly, so loudly, in fact, that there are days when he returns the truck with a scratchy voice. He doesn’t have much of a range but the notes he can hit are fine. He can fool listeners into thinking he’s a good singer if the song stays within that small assortment of notes that his deep voice can make. When he’s by himself, of course, he is free to strain too high or too low at his leisure, butchering any song that crosses his path.

Today, he’s enjoying something he can’t ever remember enjoying before. He flashes back to his dreams, reliving them, and expanding them. Normally when his shrinks have him go back and change one of his dreams, it’s to try and get him to take away the dreams’ power. How can you make this silly? They’ll ask. Well, not a lot of ways one can make slaughtering a group of children silly. But he would try. ‘Maybe they’re not children but balloons? Could you be popping balloons with your sword?’ Ben had not looked at a balloon the same way again. But now, he’s having dreams that he likes. Well, partially. He’s still having the nightmares but they’ve got this element to them that he likes. Well, one character.

General Hux. Kylo Ren watches Hux closer than a retail employee does a clock. He’s memorized all those little mannerisms, some of them obvious, like how Hux rubs at his forehead when he hasn’t had enough sleep or someone is annoying him, and some of them subtle, like how he always enters the command center with his right foot first, as though he’s in a military parade. Kylo Ren is hypnotized by these things. Ben can see what it is that he likes about Hux, but he’s not sure why Kylo is so taken. Maybe it’s because in Hux, Kylo sees something of himself, sees shared flaws. Maybe it’s because Hux doesn’t show a single lick of fear around him. He might as well be a pesky child that Hux is babysitting for how he treats him. For Kylo, that’s unique. Ben wonders why it feels okay when Hux treats him that way, feels good even. His alter ego does also have “daddy issues.” 

Ben likes Hux because he’s smart and decisive. He’s cute in an insomniac ginger way, too. Ben thinks that if Hux was ever to smile, not smirk like he sometimes does but truly smile, that he could be delicious. The closest that Ben has ever come to seeing a smile on those thinly pressed lips was the most recent dream, where they played goothball together. 

“Is there any point to playing a game with a force user?” Hux asks. At least he is no longer looking at Kylo like he’d changed into a three-headed rancor. Kylo had taken off his helmet in the gym before, but Hux had never been here to see it, never seen him maskless and exposed. The solid ten seconds of the general staring at him with shock had been almost too much to bear. Kylo had resisted the urge to grab the helmet and hide again only by the smallest of fractions. Before Snoke, he would have instantly, unable to handle the curious judgment and possible rejection. Instead, he sat still, willing the color not to rise to his cheeks as Hux viewed his features - the big nose, the fluffy hair, the giant ears. It was never Kylo’s looks that gave him an advantage in life, it was always his birth and then, later, his force powers. It’s hard even now, to have someone look upon him and think that he looks, well, a bit like a Corellian Beardless Crane, especially someone that he respects.

“Force use is not involuntary,” he assures.

Hux squints a bit. “Yes, but is it… Nevermind. Fine, I’m in.” His resolution says everything that Kylo needs to know about how seriously the general is taking this little match in the gym. It also tips him off that Hux had not expected Kylo to actually take him up on the offer of a game. Perhaps he’d just been joking.

Kylo nods and begins to remove his outerwear. Hux jumps up from the bench where he’d been sitting. His face is pink and Kylo can feel Hux’s embarrassment through the force. “I’ll fetch the equipment. Will a 22 racquet suffice?” he asks, not making eye contact with Kylo.

“Yes,” says Kylo, unable to keep the amusement from his voice. He’s fully dressed underneath his robes with high-waisted black pants and a black sleeveless top with ruching on each side. Did Hux think he’d be otherwise? Space is cold. Even with the temperature controls, Kylo believes that he can still feel the cold that lurks beyond the hull. It could be imagination or just poor circulation. 

Looking more composed and less pink, Hux returns with their racquets and a cylindrical container holding three white balls. Kylo accepts his racquet as Hux again looks at the change in his appearance. ‘Yes,’ thinks Kylo. ‘Kylo Ren is a person.’ But Hux should know that, dammit. He’s not one of the silly crewmen that treat him like some sort of mythical figure. The symbol of Kylo Ren has importance, but of course, there’s still him underneath. “Lead the way,” he prompts, hoping that Hux will get on with the sport so that the scrutiny ends.

The goothball courts aboard the Finalizer are the nicest that he’s ever played in. Most places that have courts are run down. Either the balls don’t change color like they should (the color of the last hitter’s racquet), or not all of the six holes light up, that sort of thing. He’s only had the chance to play one time since he’s been here, which admittedly hasn’t been long, but everything worked perfectly and, moreover, it felt new and well constructed.

They start the first match. It’s pretty obvious that Hux is out of practice. Goothball is challenging because it’s about both aim and timing. The holes are small, only diametrically double the size of the ball itself and you only score when you successfully hit the ball in while the hole is illuminated the same color as your racquet. Hux’s shots are going too far off the mark for it to matter which color he’s aiming for. He’s trying though, pale cheeks red with exertion and eyes intent, nearly crazed with effort. 

“It seems that you’re out of practice,” Kylo voices after winning the first match.

Hux glares at him. “The first game is yours. We’ll see about the next.”

Kylo can’t stop his smile even though he knows it’s probably a bad idea to antagonize him too much. He doesn’t want Hux to take this as seriously as he probably will. The point of the exercise is to train the body and the mind. He’d just been expecting to work out as normal, choosing an off-peak time for using the gym and as soon as he’d seen Hux sitting there, dressed down in civilian clothing, Kylo wanted to keep him there, keep him like that for as long as he could. Is it any wonder, then, that his brain blocked any humor in Hux’s suggestion, tried to see it as an actual challenge?

The room echos with a satisfying thwack whenever they hit the ball. The constantly changing rings of lights around the holes they’re aiming for create dancing patterns on the room. Hux does much better the second round, finding his aim though not his timing, and his intensity begins to transform into something resembling pleasure. Hux is enjoying himself now that he’s not playing terribly. He still loses, but the game is more sportsmanlike. 

Hux says, “I think I’ve got time for one more, though you’ve won the night.” 

Kylo replies earnestly, “I’d love to.”

That’s when he sees a thing very close to a smile on Hux’s lips and they begin round three.

 

 

Ben had woken up feeling giddy, like he’d just gone on a really good date. His brain doesn’t seem to care that Hux is an imaginary person, an imaginary coworker if he’s really gonna start listing off reasons why this isn’t a good thing; it’s still releasing copious amounts of oxytocin, giving him lusty romantic feelings one way or the other. What would it have been like if after the game, they’d gone at it like rabbits right there in the gym of the starship? What would Hux be like in bed? These questions had been flitting through his lizard brain fucking constantly since then. With the long bursts of driving time, he’s having a chance to ponder them in detail.

Maybe they accidentally collide with each other on the court. ‘Shit! Are you okay?’ asks Ben. He’s half-sprawled on top of Hux. Nothing feels broken on his part, so he looks down at Hux, checking to see the damage of the human pillow beneath him. Hux smiles at him, goofily, which the situation warrants but which still melts Ben. ‘I’d be better if I didn’t have all your weight on me!’ he says, but it doesn’t sound like he means it. ‘Do you want me to get up?’ Ben asks with a playful tone. Hux, surprised by the flirtation, stammers, ‘I...I mean, yes! Do you think I intend to just lay here all night?’ Then, catching his own words, attempts to backtrack from that, but Ben cuts the pedaling off with his lips.

No, probably not. He can’t see Hux going for that. He’d probably just be mad that he was being squished.

Maybe, then, after they wrap up in the court, Hux makes a move. He watches Kylo put back on the robes and the belt, like he’s disappointed to see Kylo putting his clothes back on. But that’s probably wishful thinking on Kylo’s part. “Did you want to play another game?” he asks, wondering if that’s responsible for the wistful look on Hux’s face. “Of a sort,” says Hux crossing the distance between them. He places a hand behind Kylo’s head and pulls him in for a kiss.

Strong no to that one. Again, the cheesy lines don’t feel very Huxish. The thing is, Ben isn’t sure how something would kick off between Kylo and Hux. They’re both so proud; he can’t really see either of them making a first move. It would have to be something mutually felt and pretty much synchronized. Ben is pretty sure this attraction goes both ways. The way that they antagonize each other always feels more playful than pointed. If they wanted to destroy each other, they could. Ben suspects that it’s the closest thing that Hux has to entertainment on the Finalizer. Then, with the two of them interacting as they did, with Kylo dressed down in normal streetwear, face exposed, Ben got the impression that Hux was into it that way too. Maybe. Hell, it’s his dream, he might as well make it be so. He’s never put so much thought into the preferences of a figment of his own imagination before. 

The very short work shift passes quickly with his Hux daydreams and speculations. The highlight of the actual work part is giving Gwen the smuggled sugar cookies. She looks at him with a ‘really?’ sort of look on her face as she unwraps the napkins to find a splatter of green icing. “Thank you?” she asks exaggerating both words.

He smiles. “I thought of you as soon as I saw them!” he jokes, laughing at the disgusting little pile that the cookies ended up becoming shoved in his pocket. 

Gwen flips him the bird which he accepts happily since he totally deserves it. “You missed an awesome Thanksgiving.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. I ended up a bit too drunk to be driving very far.”

“Well, you have to come to my New Years Party then, and I won’t take no for an answer on that one. Don’t forget that you also turned down my fourth of July party too.”

He frowns. “You have a lot of parties.” Then, he feels like an asshole because she actually does look hurt. “Count on me for New Years!”

She studies him, trying to glean how much he’s just trying to placate her. He opens his eyes wide, daring her to find any lack of sincerity in his offer. “Good. I’ll text you the address.” 


	11. Dom Comes to America

Dom has been on his own since he was sixteen. That was when Brendol had taken him aside in the renovated garage that served as his father’s study and demanded that Dom join the army. Even though the room had not housed a car in over twenty years, the exhaust smell was saturated into the walls. It mixed with the smell of books, hid within the rugs beneath Brendol’s coffee-colored leather easy chair, and lurked behind glass cases of medals and war memorabilia and collectibles. Dom hated stepping into the room, always a place of punishments or ultimatums. “Meet me in my study,” were words that guaranteed that Dom would spend the rest of the day (at least) miserable. This particular day, Dom had predicted far in advance. Despite his perfect grades, participation on the football team, and weekly attendance at the same Lutheran church that had once seen his father and stepmother’s wedding, Brendol often complained of his son’s lack of discipline. What he could be finding fault with, anyone could guess. At school, he was often pointed to by mothers as the paragon of educational virtue. Brendol failed to see any of the accomplishments that others saw. To him, his son was just plain not good enough. Becoming a soldier would be the only way that would straighten the boy out and he often said so over awkward dinners where his bulldozed stepmother would sit quietly only offering up agreements lest she be seen as second-guessing her husband.

So, when Dom stepped into the room where his father spent most of his home time, he believed he was prepared for the speech that Brendol would give. And it did go just as Dom expected, complete with admonishments for how his son lacked adequate discipline and a proper vision of the future. Life, according to Brendol was not just something that happened, not if you wanted to have a life worth living. It required strategy, effort, and fortitude. Did Domnhall think that everything Brendol had in his life had just happened out of coincidence? No, it was Brendol himself who had taken the reins of his life. Then, the expected ultimatum had come. Dom would put his education on hold and join the military, just as his father and his grandfather had done.

Dom had looked around at the pictures of fighter planes, the paddle on the wall that had reddened his backside when he’d misbehaved as a child, and most importantly, the photograph of their family with its patriarch and the two subdued other members - a wife too disenfranchised to have any effect on her own life and a son too terrified and beaten down to do anything but be a good son.The picture really shows a self-important jailer and two prisoners. In the army, it would be more of the same, more people telling him what to do and then telling him he hadn’t done it good enough, to do it over. An entire institution of men like his father who never saw any of the good in anyone but themselves and who bullied everyone weaker than themselves. 

Though the ultimatum was expected, Dom’s response was not. He surprised them both that day when the words, “I believe I’ll stay in school,” came forth from his lips as though he was opting for a certain type of tea and not being brazenly defiant for the first time in his life. 

After his father’s initial surprise, he waved off Dom’s words, perhaps not wanting to accept what was happening in this petrol-scented room. “Bah, plenty of time to return to classes later. Those sorts of things can wait. And you’ll be better equipped to handle them once you’ve gotten yourself some discipline, some life experience.”

Dom had locked eyes with his father, similar green eyes unwavering on both sides. “I’m not joining up.”

The fall out was tremendous and by the time the sun had set, Dom had found himself, bags in hand, on the wrong side of a door with no key. He’d never before nor since been more terrified, more utterly lost. Dom had felt himself weak even then, but he hadn’t acquiesced to his father, not even then when everything in the world had been taken from him and his life was as bleak as the dark clouds that poured on his hair, clothes, and luggage. Instead of knocking on the door like the scared puppy he felt like, he had taken his money, a trifle for a man without a home, and put himself up in a hostel for the night. He’d cried in a room with foreigners making sightseeing plans. He’d cried for how cold and lost and miserable he was, but he’d also cried because it was finally over. The manipulation and the mistreatment were over. He was finally free of Brendol Hux for good and so he cried because he was scared and alone and happy.

 

 

It’s been nearly twenty years since he’d left home, but the sensation of being in a new country starting all over again has the memories of that day dancing about on the periphery of his brain. Dom looks up at his apartment building, luggage being set on the curb by the brusque taxi driver, and he feels extremely out of his element. He reminds himself that it’s a new adventure, something to shake up the unimpressively linear path of his life then tries to quiet the voice underneath that that reminds him that he despises change and adventure. 

“You good?” the driver asks after closing his trunk. It’s nice of him to even ask. Dom has Millicent’s carrier in his hand and that’s the most important bit of his luggage, so with a quick look at the taxi as though he’s going to be able to see anything he left behind in the backseat from outside the car, he replies, “Yes, thank you.”

It’s only two stories, the apartment, and he’s on the bottom floor, so the door he’s looking at, 138, is his. It’s surreal. This whole venture has been. He sets Millicent outside and brings all the rest of the luggage to the door. The crime rate in Boston is actually better than that in London, by a not insignificant amount, but that doesn’t mean that he wants to risk everything he now has by leaving it willy-nilly outside his flat… his apartment. 

Dom carries Millicent across the threshold into their new home. He takes a deep inhale and is relieved when all that he’s met with is new carpet smell and not cigarette smoke or cat piss. It’s a loft-style flat, so he first encounters the hallway, where he stacks up the cat carrier, his suitcases, and two boxes. To his right are stairs. He notes that there is no railing, which is a little odd, but he’s not a clumsy person so that should be fine. The left, the hallway proper, leads to the living room. He takes that path, seeing the kitchen on the left. The dining room is separated from the living room by a counter which could also be used for eating purposes. He didn’t pack up a dining set to fly over the Pacific ocean, so this is probably where he’ll be taking his meals. The living room is so large that Dom actually laughs. The one room is probably the entire size of his London flat which was, to be fair, a glorified closet. There’s a sliding door which leads onto a small completely fenced patio. He sees evidence of past barbecues on the pavement. He does have a soft spot for grilled food, the flecks of char appealing to his taste buds. Perhaps once spring comes, he’ll consider purchasing one. For now, though, he tracks back in some snow and dirt mixture onto the carpet and slides the door shut. 

Upstairs, he takes a peek at the loo, mostly taken up by a shower. After the travel, it will feel immensely good to get underneath some hot water. The bedroom is perfect, not too big (though still far larger than his old one) and with one window that looks out onto a neighbor’s backyard.  He’d had the foresight to buy a cheap bed from that American giant, Walmart, and they’d offered installation for about a quarter of the price of the bed. He sits on it. It’s quite serviceable for 150 pounds. The flat feels homier than he expected. When he’d seen that the place was over 100 square meters, he’d been worried that it would feel too palatial, like he was living in Gone With the Wind’s Tara. But the floor plan seems poorly executed, smaller than the large number would indicate, and therefore it is cozier. 

“Home,” he says. Then, because it’s so unreal, he adds, “In America.” 

But, this is Millicent’s place too and he lets her out of her carrier. She’s hesitant to leave its safety. For however long the trip felt to him, it must have been ten times longer and a hundred times more terrifying. She does place one tentative orange paw outside the carrier and then another. She’ll explore the place, probably find a hidey hole. Once she sees that no predator has murdered him, she’ll come out and start running the place just as she did his London flat. Dom only wishes that he had someone he could look to the same way. 

Well, he’s been on a flight or in a car for most of his day now and he’s looking forward to unpacking the small amount of his life that he’s transported here to the states. Only once he gets everything in their proper places will he be able to relax and find his own hidey hole. 

 

 

Unpacking reveals just how many things he’s going to have to buy. With his long phone list in hand, he journeys to his first ever Walmart. TV had him thinking that every city in America would be either Bonanza or Sex and the City. Boston looks to be somewhere between that. Places are spread out as he’d expected, but they still look more or less as they should, like buildings, not ranches or skyscrapers. The Walmart is a whole other entity, with its fluorescent lighting that hurts the eyes and its bustle of people. It’s immediately both overwhelming and disgusting. But, he knows he can get practically anything on his list there and so it is there that he goes. He’s walked to this one, it being only a couple of km from his apartment, but he’ll probably take a Lyft back since his list is so extensive. 

He buys hangers and toilet paper, allergy meds and eye drops, a coffee machine and sandwich fixings, and the list goes on and on. The frugal part of himself twists in discomfort as he fills the bulky blue cart with everything that he already should have, did have at his real home in London. He’s questioning himself, wondering if all this will be wasted by the job not working out. He’s even wondering if he’ll be too homesick, too fish out of water to do his job right here. He might just go running back home like a child that can’t handle summer camp. But, this is the plan and Dom has never been one to deviate from a plan. The total comes to only a little over $400 which, after some google conversion, is amazingly less than he’d expected. He’d been anticipating the imported costs. His inner Scrooge relaxes and he takes his taxi with household goods home and in good spirits that he’d survived his first Walmart trip.


	12. The Finalizer arrives at Starkiller Base

They are standing side-by-side looking out the command center viewport at the floating base ahead of them. Starkiller Base. This will change everything. The First Order doesn’t have the resources that the empire did so when they strike, they must strike to kill, not just maim. The anticipation is heady, knowing what is to come, knowing that he is at the forefront of bringing an end to the Republic for good, finishing what his grandfather could not. Kylo’s mask does not allow for much vision on his periphery but he dares not overtly look for Hux’s reaction. Instead, he reaches out through the force, without pushing to the point of detection, to ascertain the general’s mood. He finds a mirror of his own excitement and eagerness. 

The Finalizer itself will not be landing on the base. There would be too much opportunity for things to go wrong, having so much of the First Order’s power in one place. They can’t guarantee with absolute certainty that their moves aren’t being relayed to their enemies (which make up over half the galaxy) and so they will behave with logical caution. Though it would be best to gauge the construction progress via holovid and report back to Snoke that way, Kylo suspects that the Supreme Leader thinks it a good motivator for the crew, to actually see the progress, to see the physical manifestations of their hard work. It certainly seems to have those on the command deck excited, himself and the ever-stoic Hux included. 

“Within fighter range, sir,” announces the navigator. He’s speaking to Hux who has the military background to back his titles that Kylo lacks. They are not quite equals, the two of them, because Kylo’s purpose aboard the Finalizer is less traditional, less defined. He is the leader of the Knights of Ren, right-hand apprentice to Supreme Chancellor Snoke, and that may have a huge impression on those that he interacts with on the ship, but it doesn’t give a lot of detail to what the expectations of duties on board are.

“Very good,” says Hux. He turns to Kylo. “Do you intend to survey the construction as well?”

There’s amusement there in Hux’s question, probably because he knows he’s being childish, asking a question for which he already knows the answer. It appears that the need to goad is not one-sided in their dynamic. “Yes, I will be flying the Ganymede.”

“The name is larger than the ship,” notes Hux. Definitely, playful. 

Kylo hesitates for a moment, concerned about pushing a boundary even in this current ease between them, before saying, “It seats two. You could fly down with me.”

The discomfort that Kylo had felt in bringing himself to say that is absolutely worth Hux’s face. He looks appropriately aghast at the idea of the two of them in the tiny ship, isolated and intimate. Kylo resists the urge to laugh, not so much because of Hux, but because that would show too much of himself to the crew that surrounds them.  Instead, he leaves the control deck, his inappropriate suggestion unanswered, and allows his smile to fill his helmet.

  
  


Kylo is bored. He should be used to it by now, with so many dedicated hours of standing around being useless on the control deck of The Finalizer, but he’d been hopeful that checking out a superweapon would be a bit more exciting. But they’ve been in the facility for hours and all that’s happened is the same dull conversations that happen on board the ship. The words, the halls, the machines, all are monotonous. Hux is loving it. Of course, Hux is. A whole building of zombies that he can order around, systems of operations that he can set into place. At first Kylo tries to keep up with Hux’s excited long strides as he traverses the whole damn place, talking to engineers, inspecting machinery, making notations on his tablet. After a good hour of that, he gives up, finds a spot and sticks to it. Occasionally, Hux passes by, usually in a group of other regulation-loving overly-educated soldiers. 

He sits on the floor, intending to meditate, just let his mind drift off in this public place because it’s better than what he’s been doing, but, then he stands up again, finding himself unable to achieve any sense of self. The restlessness runs deeper in him than his sith mind can handle. Instead, he glares at objects around him. He counts the number of visible conduits. Then he counts the oblong light panels. He’s just considering sitting down again, if for no other reason than his legs are tired, when he senses the near-joyful presence of General Hux. It’s been six hours.

“What do you think, Ren? An impressive contrivance, isn’t it?”

“Impressive is not the word I would use.”

Hux’s cap is off, probably set down somewhere and forgotten about. His hair is about as messy as it can be with, the gel that he normally uses giving up out of boredom too, no doubt. Hux’s eyes are bright and happy, even when he gives Kylo a confused look. “No? Hm. Perhaps it’s harder to impress a Knight of Ren.” 

Hux doesn't realize the double meaning of his words, doesn't know that for weeks or longer, his behavior has caught Kylo's interest. “Few have managed it.”

The nuance is lost on Hux, who simply furrows his brow a bit, but continues on. “They believe we are actually capable of utilizing it now, though its scheduled initial execution isn’t for months. I imagine that will please Supreme Leader.”

It’s bad enough that he’s been on Starkiller Base this long, he has no intention to also talk about it with Hux. He remains silent.

There’s a bit of exasperation in Hux’s voice when he asks, “Surely you think this can turn the tide in our favor?” When Kylo allows the quiet to continue, Hux’s formerly happy eyes switch over to angry, which is more their natural state. He shakes his head. “Impossible,” he mutters, turning a sharp heel. 

Well, that provided a little entertainment anyway. 


	13. Ben and Dom Arrive at the New Year's Eve Party

“Holy shit!” Gwen is a glorious metallic marvel. She looks like human tinsel with her silver: hair, top, pants, and shoes. As he stares with unexaggerated open mouth, he notices even more little silvery details. She has silver false eyelashes and nails. 

It’s obvious from her laugh that his reaction pleases her. “You expected me to wear overalls to my own New Years party?” she asks, reaching out and hugging him. He flinches a bit, never suspecting her to be the hugging type, but the strong cloud of alcohol aroma around her head tips him off as to why she might be so touchy-feely. 

“Well, yeah, I’ve never seen you wear anything else, so therefore you must only wear overalls. Everyone ceases to exist when I can’t see them.”

“You’re silly. Welcome to the party. Booze is in the kitchen.” She points.

The house is packed. He’d had to park the next block down because of all the cars. Ben does fine in crowds, but even he’s looking with a bit of trepidation at becoming a sardine once he crosses the invisible barrier of the front entrance. The people look to be about his age or younger, some have silly New Years’ hats or glasses. Most have drinks in their hands and appear to be having a genuinely good time. He’s glad he came, suddenly, realizing that he’s been relying too much on his imagination for fun lately.

“Thanks for inviting me,” he says honestly. 

She flits her hand in front of his face. “I invite everybody!” Ben suspects she’s been in the kitchen quite a lot tonight judging by the jerky motion of her hand. She’s a large woman, not fat, but tall and muscular and solid. He thinks it probably takes a lot of alcohol to get her drunk.

“So, I’m not special?” he asks, jokingly. He’s not offended. He’s totally relieved that she hasn’t been singling him out for this like he’d worried. He had it in his head that maybe despite her teasing to the contrary that maybe did want to make a hetero-exception for him and that he’d piss her off by having to turn her down. That would make work a lot more awkward down the road. But, now he sees that she was pestering him like she pestered half of Boston, to try and make her shindig as full and fun as possible. 

Gwen looks at him as though seriously considering the question, then she laughs. “Shut up and mingle!” She gives him a shove and he is officially part of the party, imaginary line of demarcation between party and outside world crossed. 

Like everyone else, he travels first to the kitchen for the alcohol. Then he’ll have something to do with his hands while he talks with strangers. Unfortunately, the place seems to be the central hub of conversation and getting to the actual bottles poses a challenge. He exchanges smiles with nice-seeming partygoers who note his passage to the round wooden table in the center of the kitchen. There are also bottles on the counters as well, but the ones on the table have a more sacrifice on an altar feel that he digs. 

“Trying to get to the booze?” asks a woman whose shoulder is against is. 

“Trying,” he laughs.

“You need a cowcatcher!”

He has no idea what she said, so he asks, “What?”

“A cowcatcher!”

He has no idea what she’s talking about so he stares at her blankly.

“They’re those things at the front of trains. You know, so you can just run over people in your way.”

“Oh! I didn’t know those even had names!” He makes a face, feeling dumb. 

Seeing that he’s trying to make his way to the bottles on the table, a woman takes pity on him and moves from her spot. He swoops in for an ever-present red plastic cup and begins to mix himself up a drink. The cowcatcher woman introduces herself and it’s not very long before he starts to realize that she’s flirting with him. He excuses himself with the not very pretense of having to put his coat somewhere. According to the couple talking next to kitchen doorway, the coats are in Gwen’s room which they point to. A girl outside the room confirms that it is, in fact, Gwen’s room and that somewhere inside there is a cat, but no one has seen it. Ben knows his drunk self well enough to know that after a few drinks, he’ll be on all fours peering under the bed trying to find the cat. He likes cats okay but he fucking loves them when he’s drunk. 

  
  


 

Dom can tell which house the party is at before he can actually see the house, which absolutely positively means that this party is too cool for him. The “new country, new Dom” mantra is less the trumpeting military cadence and more a squeaky floorboard beneath his social anxiety. Well, he’d taken the Uber here, it would be a waste to not at least get credit with his new coworker for having attended. He approaches the noisy illuminated house as one would a King Cobra. The door is open, even though it’s snowing outside, so he knows he probably shouldn’t knock. It feels so rude to just walk in; he doesn’t know this woman from Adam but social cues seem to be making the situation clear. He raps his knuckle a bit on the metal frame of the screen door, unable to actually just barge in. It catches the attention of a woman standing near it, but she only looks at him as though he’s an inconsequential idiot (true enough) and continues her conversation with someone just beyond his sight. 

“You can just go in,” a voice says from right beside him. Dom jumps back, not having noticed the all black-clad smoker on the patio. “Jesus!” the man says. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Uh, no, I, right. Thank you. Just… didn’t see you.” Well, not that he needed the extra blood pumping through his body but he has it regardless. He gathers himself and opens the screen door. 

He feels he’s made a grave error when not one of the twenty or so people in the front room look at him when he enters. It isn’t that he’s afraid he’s in the wrong house - what are the odds of two ragers on the same block on the same night - but the idea of him fitting in at this sort of event is beyond ridiculous. He’s not a new Dom. He may be more physically fit and he may be in America, but he still is just as useless with people as ever he was. It’s been fifteen seconds and he already regrets having told Oscar that he’d come. 

“Welcome!” says a vastly tall robot woman. She is shiny from toes to hairline, all at least six feet of her. He is so in over his head. 

“Hello. I’m um, a friend of Oscar’s. I, um, work with him at First Order.” Then, because that was a pointless overshare, he asks, “Are you Gwen?”

“That’s an adorable accent!” she gushes. “Welcome to the party. Yes, I’m Gwen.” She offers her hand and as he dutifully shakes it, he notices that even her nails are metallic. She uses the leverage that she has on his arm, which judging from the look of her she could break in two easier than a wishbone, to pull him in closer to her. “You’ll be fine, relax. Everyone is welcome here. The booze is in the kitchen.”

Something about the way she says this, about him being fine, not about the location of the liquor resonates with him and even though it’s awkward, he appreciates her saying it. “Uh yes, I suppose I seem a bit.. Yeah.”

Gwen shrugs. “If there weren’t shy people, people like me would have no one to talk over.” Dom smiles and looks around. No one else is paying attention to anyone outside of themselves. That’s one thing that he needs to remember when he’s feeling self-conscious like this; no one cares as much about the ass you’re making of yourself as you do. “Looks like it’s still snowing?” she points at his coat.

He looks too, as though it’s surprising. “Yes. Oh, I should have taken off my shoes.” 

Gwen shakes her head. “It’s not that nice of a place. But I can put your coat with the others if you want?”

“I actually wasn’t planning on staying long.”

Her eyes narrow. “Oh no, don’t show up with one foot out the door. You give me your coat and you stay here long enough to have one drink, to say hello to your friend Oscar, and long enough for the shakes to go away.” 

It’s rude for her to call out his nervousness in that way. But, strangely, he doesn’t resent it. Instead, he takes a deep breath and pulls at the buttons on the front of his coat. When he hands it to her, it feels like he’s entering into some sort of contract with her. He will give her one drink and one visit with his coworker, but he isn’t sure his hands are capable of not shaking with this many strangers pressing in around him. 

She accepts it with a warm, silvery-lipped smile. “So, I’m Gwen. What’s yours?”

“Dom,” he says. They shake again with her arm draped by his coat. 

“Have fun tonight Dom. If it gets too much, the coat is in my room down that hallway.” 

He likes Gwen, as odd as his introduction to her has been. She feels like someone he can trust, which is not a feeling he gets from people very often. The little thing of letting him know that he isn’t actually hostage here, social agreement or not, means a lot to him. “I’ll find that booze then,” he offers.

She smiles. “You’ve got a lot of catching up to do,”  she says with a wink.

He resists saying that he could smell that already. Instead, he straightens at his black button-down shirt, wishes that he had shaved prior to coming, and makes his way to the kitchen.


	14. Meeting in Real Life

“Ren!” The music is loud and the people all around him are loud, but somehow he hears it, maybe only because the name is so like his own that it catches his attention, but Ben will come to believe otherwise. Because he already knows the voice from his dreams, knows the speaker when he looks in his direction without ever having met him. Ben feels like the world has become a kaleidoscope, reality and dreams shifting places, overlapping in parts, blinding him with the bright lights of the party and the dark unexplored places of the galaxy in waning and waxing degrees. 

He is impotent to do anything but stare and Hux, General Hux of the First Order, is there in Gwen’s kitchen doing exactly the same back at him. “Hux?” he asks, already low voice dropping down as though he’d just woken up or screamed himself hoarse. 

Short red hair with no little black cap, freckles across his nose, lips wider than usual because they’re open in shock and not pressed tight with anger. Ben takes it all in, studies this apparition with a desperate, stunned scrutiny unparalleled in his life. It’s Hux but he’s wearing a long-sleeved black shirt and not a uniform. Hux would never let his hair be so wild, so just-had-a-wild-fuck askew, nor allow the tiny red stubble to dot his chin like this. Yet, it has to be Hux because he’d called his dream name. 

“Hux?” he asks again at the man with Hux’s visage. People between them or not, Ben steps forward to touch him, to see if his hand just passes through Hux, but he stops just short, can’t convince himself to do it for fear of erasing the mirage. 

“Ren,” Hux repeats and a chill darts up Ben’s spine, every hair he’s ever thought about growing standing up on end. “How the _ fuck _ are you here?” Hux isn’t angry, Ben can tell, even with the deeply emphasized curse. He’s surprised and scared just like Ben.

Ben shakes his head. “I don’t know.” It’s inadequate. He’s still simultaneously trying to talk himself into and out of touching Hux. “Are you… Are you Hux?”

Hux nods, eyes hypnotically focused on his. Then, he blinks, shakes his head. “No, I mean, I am and I’m not.” One hand comes up and rubs the center of his forehead and Ben knows that gesture so well, is in awe that he’s seeing it while awake. This time though Hux has no glove. His hands look so naked, like the day they’d played Goothball. Hux shakes his head again in disbelief. “You’re Kylo Ren.”

“I am and I’m not,” repeats Ben. He devours the gestures, the appearance, and the overwhelming realness of his imagination figment. 

A woman behind Hux taps him on the shoulder with a polite “excuse me,” and he shifts aside allowing for her to pass by, only looking away from Ben because he’s obviously startled that other people exist right now. It’s a reminder for Ben as well.

“Outside,” Ben suggests. It sounds like an order but it isn’t and Hux doesn’t seem to take it that way, because he nods in agreement, hearing a question mark that should have been in Ben’s suggestion. 

“You’ll follow?” asks Hux, obviously not trusting Ben to remain corporeal if he turns his back. Ben can’t blame him. 

“Yeah,” he promises. 

It’s impossible to tell if anyone in all this drunken celebrating has even noticed what just happened, if anything has happened at all. For all Ben knows, he’s hallucinating. Finally going off the deep-end because of childhood trauma and a deep, bitter inability to connect to any living person. He could be talking to no one, carrying a Fight Club-esque conversation with himself in a glass installer’s kitchen. Something that adds to the surreality of the moment is how the party seems to be making room for Hux. Moses parting the drunken sea. He sees Gwen, impossible to miss in her New Years outfit, but she doesn’t notice him heading to the door. Is he heading there alone or is he following a character from his dream? 

Hux looks back as he reaches for the screen door, looks relieved that they made it with both of them still real. Ben follows through the door onto the porch. It’s quiet outside, the noise and bright lights of the party inside neatly contained within the house. There are people even out here, though only three, talking and smoking, both actions creating puffs of smoke in the freezing air. Hux steps down into the snow of the front yard, light flakes immediately attaching themselves to his hair. The white crunches beneath the black of Hux’s shoes and Ben thinks how he’d worn tennis shoes in the gym and how it had looked so strange to see him out of his uniform boots. What would Kylo Ren have made of the wing-tipped dress shoes?

They face each other in the snow. Ben’s an idiot in a yellow t-shirt but he doesn’t feel it right now. He could warm them both with his nervous energy. Again, he can’t help but just stare. He’d remembered everything just right. People aren’t supposed to be able to do that with dreams, right? The memories fade. They don’t get etched in like a tattoo. But these are Hux’s lips and chin and nose and all the other parts he’d been too scared to really fantasize about because he didn’t want his daydreams to be untrue to how Hux would really act. He was so afraid he’d get Hux’s reactions wrong. Also, afraid that if he wanted them too much that Hux would know, that somehow Ben’s feelings would bleed into Kylo Ren’s and then they’d both be desperate to have something they couldn’t have.

“Your hair is shorter,” says Hux. 

“Yours is messier,” Ben replies. 

Ben smiles first, then, amazingly so does Hux. The smile that he always knew could be there under the surface, under the tension and discipline and anger. It’s adorable.

“This is fucking mental!” Hux laughs, covering his face with one hand. 

Now Ben’s heard him smile and laugh. It’s obviously the best day of his life. He laughs too, but it’s more of an exhale than a gut laugh. He’s too bewildered still to do that. “Yes, it is. It is very fucking mental.” He nods along with himself as he speaks the words. 

“You’re Kylo Ren, from The Finalizer?”

“Well, The Finalizer is your ship. I’m Kylo Ren of… well, the Knights of Ren.” It sounds braggy.

Hux’s face lifts up to the sky and he takes a loud deep breath. “I can’t believe this is happening.” Then, when he looks at Ben again, he asks, “How long? How long have you been having the dreams?”

Technically he’s had these dreams since he was a kid, but they started to include Hux a few months back. “Ones with you in them? Two months, maybe three?”

“Same.” Hux looks like he’s doing calculus in his head. He’s trying to assess the situation, analyze it. Ben would expect nothing less. “And what was the last dream you had?”

Ben hopes his face doesn’t betray him because he immediately thinks about teasing Hux about taking The Ganymede together. “The um, the inspection of Starkiller Base.”

Hux nods. “Yes, for me as well. Christ! This is… this is amazing!” He’s practically yelling. That’s at least something he’s seen dream Hux do, but never from a happy excitement. It’s not just the way he dresses then that’s different from the Hux he knows. Well, that’s obvious. This Hux doesn’t command a spaceship. “I… Do you have, damn, I have too many questions.”

Ben would answer anything right now. He feels like he could have the force in real life, summon it up with just his brain and his fingertips if it kept Hux in this mood of pure shocked delight. 

Hux asks, “Do you have any questions?”

His brain will try and sort this out later. He really feels like the epitome of dumbfounded right now because he is so lost as to how this whole thing came about that he just wants to reach out and pet Hux. His dream is right here. At least, the part of it that turned all the nightmares into something better, someone that made him less afraid to fall asleep. “Can I… can I touch you?” Ben asks. He almost adds, “to see if you’re real” but feels it’s implied. 

Hux nods. “Yes,” as though it’s the most natural thing in the world and Ben need not have asked.   
It’s fucking freezing outside and he’s wearing a t-shirt but Ben would swear to all the gods that the cold is not the reason his hand trembles as it approaches Hux’s face. With one long index finger, he pokes at Hux’s go-to rubbing spot on his forehead. Beneath his hand, Hux’s eyebrows knit together, a confused look on his face. Quickly, he bursts into laughter and Ben joins in too. It’s so absurd, his finger jabbing into Hux’s face. When he pulls it back, he announces with glee, “You’re real.”  
The two idiots stare with smiles at each other. Then, Ben offers himself up as a test subject. “Do you want to touch me?”

“You mean, do I want to poke you in the head?” jokes Hux.

“It’s only fair.”

As though accusing him of something, Hux jabs his finger out tentatively, drifts it close to Ben’s forehead but then dips lower, pokes the end of his nose. From over Hux’s hand, Ben can still see his eyes, sees the excitement in them and the way that he doesn’t avoid the shared gaze. “Your nose has been verified as real.”

Ben wants him to verify his entire body, but he keeps that thought to himself. When Hux takes back his finger, Ben uses the opportunity to sniffle some cold-induced snot. 

“You said since I've been in the dreams. Have you dreamed about Kylo Ren before?”

“Since I was eleven.”

Hux looks nearly as surprised by this admission as he had seeing Been in the first place. “I'm jealous.”

It's genuinely meant but he's sure that the look he gives Hux has to convey his feelings about that. Rather than get into how the nightmares have haunted him for so long, he changes the subject. “We should either head back in or get coats.” He hates that he’s the one ruining the moment but all he’s wearing is a stupid yellow t-shirt and if his nipples have to get any harder, they’re going to pierce through the cotton. 

“It is bloody freezing,” agrees Hux. He’s not actually that much better off than Ben; the long-sleeved shirt that he’s wearing looks light and his nose is bright red. “I read that the climate here was like this before I agreed to move here, so I suppose I’ve no excuse.”

“How long have you been in America?” Ben asks.

“Not long.” They work in reverse, Hux leading the way back towards the house.  They even step in the same snow indents. 

As they pass by the smokers, three now, Ben addresses them. “You see this man in front of me, right?”

The smoker he’d been looking at asks, “Yeah?” probably expecting a joke.

“Good,” replies Ben and waits for Hux, who had paused to wait for him, to continue. Behind them, he hears, “He should’ve stuck to beer.”

Despacito is blasting over the speakers as Hux does his crowd shark impression, leading them back to the coat room. Ben had it in his head that Hux was shorter. It could be Hux’s slight frame or maybe it’s Kylo Ren’s presence that gave the impression, but they’re eye-to-eye, as much equals in stature as they are in power. 

Bedrooms used as coat rooms have a sort of sacred quality, a magic circle of protection from the hubbub at any party. No one wants to spend too much time in the room, lest they be accused of snooping through, or, worst of all, stealing others’ belongings. So, social mores dictate that only a brief amount of small talk be made while the items are removed and left before the newly stripped-down partygoer moves along to other, more acceptable, rooms. It’s unsurprising, then, that the room is empty when Hux opens it. He closes it behind Ben, muffling the chatter and Luis Fonsi. 

Hux looks at Ben, rather than the pile of potentially warm outerwear, his face wonderfully, amazingly close. They stare at each other. Hux looks at his lips and back up into his eyes. Fuck, he’d thought they had chemistry on The Finalizer but this kind of connection is obscene. There’s that unwritten rule about coat rooms, and even still, Ben wants to lay his dream crush down on the stack of other people’s stuff, lick him from his normally booted feet to the stubborn forehead spot.

“I can’t believe you’re real,” Ben whispers. He reaches out, slowly, to allow Hux time to back away from his hand, finally allowing the tips of his fingers to touch his cheek. It feels warm like a mug of coffee against his icy palm and colored an inviting pink hue by the blood underneath, a circulatory system both fighting the snowy elements outside and reacting to an emotional situation at once. His thumb strokes the pinkest part at the top of Hux’s cheek, fingertips curling under his jaw. If it’s a hallucination, then it’s the best one that anyone’s ever had, in realism and content. 

“Ren…” starts Hux, hundreds of words apparently behind his tongue but stuck a bit because he doesn’t say anything else.

“Ben,” he corrects. “Ben Organa.”

Hux is surprised. “Ben?”

Ben nods, still stroking, still considering swooping in for a kiss even though they met like fifteen minutes ago. “No knights of Ben in this reality.”

“No Finalizer either,” says Hux sadly. He lays his hand over Ben’s, pressing it minutely more into his cheek. “Just Dom. Domnhall McDougal.”

“Domnhall.” It doesn’t sound right. “Dom.” That’s much better. Hux should have a one syllable name, something efficient like him. “A general without a ship.”

Dom shakes his head slowly, taking Ben’s hand along. “No, a control freak with nothing to control.” 

It’s stupid, or brave, definitely reckless, definitely a Kylo action, impulsive, potentially damaging; Ben adds his other hand to the uncovered cheek and glides his lips forward, touching them to Dom’s cold ones, more like a hug than a kiss. “You can control me,” he whispers.

Hux, Dom, whoever he is, kisses Ben like it’s the last kiss he’ll ever have. The thin lips he’s fantasized about feel softer, fuller when they’re opening with his own. The front of his tongue licks firmly upwards on Ben’s. Teeth bite at his lip. His hands grip the front of Ben’s yellow t-shirt like they’re about to fight, pulling him closer, but they’re already so close that he can only catch glimpses of a blurred face, fuzzy eyelashes, little feathers above lids slammed shut, and a nose that ends only at Ben’s cheek. He’s kissing the man from his dream, kissing his figment, and he thinks that he should die at this moment, because everything from here on out is going to be downhill. His hands are probably gripping too tightly on the back of Dom’s neck, probably pulling him in too tightly, and he’s probably using too much tongue, but fuck it if he’s going to leave one single spot of Dom’s mouth unlicked. 

Dom moans. The sound has an effect like sunlight on ice cream, melting every part of him. The hands on his shirt loosen, slide along his sides down to his hips. Oh, this is heaven. He’s died in some freak accident and he’s in heaven. Either that or he’s in here by himself, just imagining that Hux is gripping onto his hip bones, pulling them both closer together, and kissing the ever-loving shit out of him. 

“I can’t believe this is happening,” whispers Dom, their mouths taking the slightest of breaks. His eyes scan over Ben’s face, lips. “What would they think?” He asks, amusement in his voice.

Dom could mean the people outside the room, but Ben knows he isn’t. He smiles. “Are you trying to get me to tell you Kylo’s secrets?” he asks, licking a streak up Dom’s neck, nibbling at the skin behind his ear. He whispers into the sweetly curved shell, “Want to know if Kylo wants to do this with Hux?”

A tremor ripples its way through Dom, words doing exactly what he’d been hoping they would. But, because this is Hux, even if he’s in this reality, he smart mouths back. “He probably thinks it’s the last thing in the world he wants.” Dom’s hands drift down to Ben’s backside, pressing lightly, encouraging him to tip his hips forward. He kisses Ben again and again. Then, because this is also Dom, who probably has more vulnerabilities than a fleet commander, he asks, “Does he though?”

It makes Ben laugh. Dom smiles sheepishly. 

It’s really amazing that they’ve managed to have the amount of alone time in the coat room that they have, so Ben really shouldn’t be pissed at the man who opens the door. “Oh, excuse me,” he says looking genuinely mortified before closing it again.

They’ve come untangled, the childish action of making out at a party seems to require the equally childish reaction of guilt at having “gotten caught,” but they’re still inches apart because they are just standing beside a bed. A sunburn of embarrassment connects each freckle on Hux’s face. They let Ben know what he’s already suspected, make out time is done for now. It’s on them for not really breaking the rules and just locking the door and fucking on the pile of other people’s coats.

“Ehrm, which is your coat?” asks Dom, suddenly shy, self-conscious. 

Kylo Ren would chase down the man who interrupted and split him in two with his lightsaber. “The orange one,” he says, pointing to the neon color obvious even below so many other jackets. 

Dom shuffles things around, comes up with the coat and holds it up incredulously. “This one?”

The judgment, a very Hux trait, makes Ben smile. “To match your hair.” 

“My hair is not orange.” His serious tone and the accompanying scowl makes Ben think that he’s heard that a time or two before. 

One by one, Dom flips through the pile of clothes. Then, he starts again. “It should be near the top.” He stops about a third of the way down. “The hostess might still have it.”

“Well, that’s handy. We have to thank her and crap before we leave anyway.”

Dom snorts. “Social etiquette.” 

Ben reaches out, strokes Dom’s forearm gently. “Don’t tell me Dom also isn’t good at social events.” 

Another Hux thing, the “You’re a fucking moron” look that Dom shoots him pleases him as much as it does Kylo. It’s a bad sign that he’s suddenly sharing so many commonalities with the maniac of his dreams. How much overlap is there that he’s never noticed before? 

Before they leave the coat room, Ben steals one more kiss, a small one that is returned with enthusiasm. Then, they’re back into the fray. It’s gotten louder and denser since their foray, at least here in the living room. A quick look at his phone tells him that it’s only ten minutes til midnight. No wonder it’s so chaotic. “Ball drops in ten!” he shouts over to Dom.

Dom looks surprised, as though he’s forgotten that it’s a holiday. “Oh,” he says. “Shall we stay for that?”

“I’m not used to you asking for things.” 

A red eyebrow darts upward. “Fine, we’re staying for that.” 

Ben smiles and nods, tilting his forehead towards Dom’s. “As you command, General,” he whispers. 

“Don’t be an idiot!” says Dom with a surprised laugh. He pushes Ben’s face away.

“Dom! You made it!” 

A dark-skinned man with wavy hair and some of the thickest eyebrows Ben’s ever seen approaches his figment who actually looks like one at that moment, face paling from the unexpected recognition while he’d been flirting with Ben. The man holds his hand out and Dom actually hesitates, just for a second, before taking it. But he does and smiles a fake, uncomfortable smile. “Thanks for inviting me.”

The man looks at Ben and back at Dom, obviously awaiting an introduction. When none comes, he reaches out a hand towards Ben, initiating it himself. “Oscar. I’m one of Dom’s coworkers.”

Oscar is what is generally considered as dashing. Not-so-tall but dark and handsome, and instantly likeable. Ben evaluates the man’s grip as he shakes, confidently firm but not trying to assert dominance. “Ben. I’m Dom’s date.”

“Has it been worth coming out for?” Oscar asks Dom, then to Ben adds, “Dom was pretty reluctant, but I was able to guilt him in with the “networking” angle.” 

Ben grins. He likes this Oscar guy. “I was badgered a bit to come myself. Gwen’s a ball-buster!”

Their words are shouted, but still barely audible. On top of the music, someone, probably Gwen, has turned on the TV and the live footage of Times Square. At the moment, it feels like there are as many people in the single level Boston home as there are in New York. It’s weird to feel included in something that happening so far away. 

“That’s why we love her so much!” 

“One minute!” Gwen screams over everyone. Most of the party looks to the TV screen, some begin pre-emptively kissing their partners, others chug their drinks. 

“To be continued!” yells Oscar. He turns around, grabs onto his date, a serious-faced black man at least a decade younger, and they watch the broadcast arms circling each other’s waists.

When Ben looks at Dom, he finds the green eyes already on him, an expression not unlike the one in the bedroom within them. He figures he might as well go for it, so he moves in for a kiss, fully expected Dom to resist the PDA. At first, he seems to, lips staying shut, eyes darting around them at the room full of people that don’t give a flying fuck what they are up to. Then, maybe realizing that, or maybe because Ben’s just such a good kisser, he begins kissing back. Ben wraps his arms around Dom’s neck, his wrists loosely locking behind. 

The room and Times Square shout 10, starting the countdown. Their mouths are too busy, lips finding perfect give and resistance in each kiss. Each number pounds into his ears and his chest. Dom’s arms snake around him, pull him in close. Breathing is for suckers. 

“Happy New Year!” 

Noisemakers and cheers, colliding glasses and kisses, the whirling lights of the strobe machine. 

They eventually pull apart, both breathing hard. Dom looks amazing fresh from kisses, his lips shiny from mutual spit. 

“Happy New Year, Hux.”

“Happy New Year, Ren.”

Only a couple of minutes in and it’s already the best year of his life.


	15. Way Past Dom's Bedtime

It’s the kind of late that is technically early. Dom is never, never, up this late and if he was ever to try to stay up to this time, it wouldn’t be in order to “shoot the shit” at a party. Yet, here is, on the large sectional couch in robot lady’s living room, a gloriously lovely man lying back against him, ass between his open legs, chatting with Oscar and John as though he does this sort of thing all the time. He’s even been running his fingers through Ben’s silky black hair from where it touches his neck to where it fans out on his chest. Dom can’t recall ever doing anything so intimate in such a public environment. Not that it’s particularly public anymore. Most of the party-goers bid their adieus ten minutes after the ball dropped. Those remaining now are either too inebriated to properly see themselves off or are just relaxing, like he is, enjoying the quiet that has come with the mass exodus and the lowering of the music. Now, there’s light jazz playing and the strobe light has been shut off, replaced by the glow from the Christmas tree. 

John’s lying on his back on the intersecting portion of couch, his legs over Oscar’s lap. Dom’s initial terror at being spotted with a male date was short-lived. For milliseconds, he’d worried about the hate crimes that he knows happens in the states, didn’t want to be strung up on a tree limb body covered in a Confederate flag. But, not all Americans are the hillbillies of news fame, and he’s safe here in the home of a lesbian woman and in the company of a co-worker who brought a male date of his own. 

“And then,” says John, finishing the story. “He says I can hold onto the jacket. And I knew it was more than just a passing thing, right?”

“Well, a man’s not just going to give up a jacket like that for anyone,” adds Oscar, proud grin highlighting the handsomeness of his face. When Dom had invited him to this event, that attractiveness had been part of the impetus for his resolution to be new American-side Dom, a man that wouldn’t necessarily be counted out of any social gathering, but now that he’s got Ben in his lap, Oscar’s attractiveness is something akin to the Christmas tree, just prettiness of which one can take notice. 

“Are you asleep at my party, Ben Smith?” calls out a female voice. Dom looks up, startled as Gwen, eye makeup smeared and lipstick gone, appears beside the couch like a disapproving mother. Good timing on her part; Dom doesn’t know how he would have told his own how did you meet story (Oh, about 15 minutes before midnight).

He’s been wondering if Ben’s drifted off, having been quiet for a rather lengthy while. Strangely, that hasn’t made Dom feel uncomfortable, carrying on the conversation in his absence. He feels perfectly content curled up with Ben as they are, not unlike Millicent basking in a sunbeam. 

“Smith?” asks Ben, voice low and phlegmy, giving away that he had, in fact, fallen asleep on Dom’s lap. He coughs a bit, clearing his throat. 

“I don’t know your last name,” she says with a smile. To Dom, she says, “You know, this guy flirts with me all the time. I never would have guessed he was into guys.”

“Guys give better head.”

If a hole in the ground opened up for him to crawl into, Dom would eagerly fall into it. He can feel the warmth in his cheeks, the telltale signs of an embarrassed ginger. If he could do it surreptitiously, he’d smack Ben’s head and teach him a lesson about intimating that he’s received any sexual favors of that nature from him.

Gwen rolls her eyes. “I’ll take your word on that. Are you glad you stuck around, Shy Brit?” 

It’s a horror to imagine potentially having missed meeting Ben tonight and so he nods with utter sincerity. But then, fate seems to be looking out for them, doesn’t it?   

“Good! I’d say the party was a success.”

“Was? You still have guests, Gwen!” says Oscar rascally. He gestures to the legs on his lap and the sleepy brunette sprawled on top of Dom. 

“I’ve also got a chick puking in my bathroom and some guys doing bong rips on the front porch,” she says, taking what looks like a very needed seat on a camel-colored ottoman. “Like I said, success.”

“It’s not a party til someone pukes,” adds Ben. 

She makes a face. “I doubt she’s the first one. It’s almost 4.”

Dom would barely believe it if his apple watch hadn’t told him that minutes ago, not because the night has flown by, necessarily, but because he’s stayed out at a party til 4am. He and Ben might be the last guests to leave at this rate. It seems that Gwen is starting to nudge her guests in that direction. 

“Oh, Dom couldn’t find his coat earlier,” Ben says. “We thought you might still have it but that was around midnight.”

She looks guilty. “Sorry about that, Shy Brit. I got sidetracked by some drinking before I got to the room. It’s there now though. Or, it should be.”

Ben looks at him, head upside down, weight of the back of his skull in the center of Dom’s chest. “What’s it look like?”

Again, uncharacteristically with the others looking on, he strokes Ben’s chin, just loving having him there in the flesh, for real, touchable and thoughtful enough to offer to grab his coat. “It’s a black pea coat. Four buttons in the front. Purell in the left pocket.”

“Sanitary,” Ben says with a smile. Then, he rises up. It’s probably for the best because the weight was pressing quite a bit on Dom’s spine and he hadn’t even noticed. He adjusts on the couch, scooting his ass back and closing his legs, posture much more like that of Hux, straighter, more alert. He’s not pissed, hadn’t been throughout the course of the evening, but he’d had a small buzz earlier when Ben had fetched some drinks from the kitchen for them both to sip at. He watches Ben leave the room, fetching his coat in a very boyfriendly manner.

“Well, Johnny boy, are you ready to hit the road?” Oscar asks his partner. 

John shrugs. “I’ve got a few more hours in me.”  
“Don’t think our hostess would care for that. I believe,” he gives a conspiratorial look before he speaks, as though he’s imparting a secret. “That she wants us to leave.”

John makes a shocked expression. “That can’t be true!” It’s nice to hear another British person talk. It’s only been weeks, but Dom’s getting kind of sick of having strangers comment on his accent, as though he hasn’t realized that he’s the odd man out here. 

“She probably only wants the bong rippers to leave,” suggests Dom, joining in the game. 

“Of course! She couldn’t mean...us!” John puts a hand to his chest in an old-timey imitation of shock. 

Gwen rolls her eyes. “Stay or go, I don’t really give a rat’s ass, but I need my beauty sleep and I’m not sharing my bed with any of you.”

Oscar smacks John’s legs. “So, we leave or you sleep on the couch.” 

“Why will I be alone?” he asks with mock petulance.

“Oscar’s too prissy to sleep on a couch,” says Gwen. “It might mess up his perfect hair.” 

Dom smiles, his heart feeling light. This is the most camaraderie he’s felt so far here in America. It’s been a while since he’s felt this comfortable with others in general. 

John drags him into the mock fight. “No worries, Dom and Ben will keep me company.”

Oscar stands up then, rudely dislodging his partner’s legs. “Oh no, you don’t!” he roars with artificial machismo. He wrenches the younger man up, practically lifting him off the couch. “You are sleeping with me!” 

At first, John’s face seems startled, the loud unexpected action catching him as off guard as any of the observers, but then, he smiles, a truly radiant, too-white smile. He finds his feet, Oscar’s arms still wrapped protectively around him. “Well, if I must.”

Gwen rolls her eyes. “You two are disgusting. Man, I hate people in love. Can'tcha do your lovey crap somewhere else?”

“Come, my beloved,” says Oscar dramatically. “You can sleep on my couch. There’ll be no mean lesbians to insult your honor there.”

The two pick up their coats, display of silliness done for now. Oscar reaches out his hand to Dom. “Glad you could make it, Dom. Really.” Then he calls out, because Ben has yet to return from the coat room (a bad sign for the whereabouts of his property). “Nice to meet you, Ben!”

Ben emerges, holding Dom’s coat. He crosses the room awkwardly, offering up his hand to Oscar for a shake. His expression looks off. It’s probably just sleepiness because he looks disoriented, but it catches Dom’s attention anyway. “Nice to meet you too, Oscar, John.” He shakes both hands in turn. The handshake looks confident, maybe too hard, and brief, just one firm shake each. The couple leaves, a white wonderland shining beyond them outside.

Dom rises from the couch, the weariness hitting him as he does. He’s way past his bedtime. Thank god there’s no work in 3 hours. Though, he supposes that people wouldn’t attend parties like this if there wasn’t a day off following them. 

When their eyes meet, it sends a happy thrill down his spine. Damn that mask that Ren always wears. He wants to see this face on the Finalizer too. Maybe Hux wouldn’t have so many problems with his colleague if he could see those bright eyes burning with earnestness. He feels pulled to Ben by the expression. 

Ben holds out his coat. “There’s no silver stripes on it. No insignias either,” he whispers. “It threw me off.”

Dom reaches out a hand, but touches Ben’s hand instead of the coat. “We’ve been over this. No Finalizer here.”

“How are you here?” Ben asks, his voice nearly cracking with emotion. That’s what Dom had been sensing. Ben’s feeling some second wave of realization. Maybe holding an object that belonged to him is like merging the worlds, like he has a piece of Hux and Dom in one spot at the same time.  

“He makes things hard for you because he likes you,” says Ben. “It overwhelms and he doesn’t know what to do about it. I mean, neither of us do really.”

In any other situation, this would be too soon, but there’s an element of divine or supernatural intervention at work here, one that he would never in a hundred years have thought possible, and so it’s okay that Ben’s already talking about his feelings, because Dom’s already thinking about his own. He’s had the impression that there is something more to Hux and Ren’s dynamic than meets the eye, something brewing beneath the sharp words. He’s not sure how much Dom is inserting into that interpretation, but if it’s just him creating lusty feelings in Hux, then at least he’s not alone, because here Ben is talking about how Kylo Ren likes him.

“I don’t expect that Hux knows quite what to make of you either,” he responds, doesn’t add that he might have a better idea if he’d ever had the pleasure of kissing those lips. “Would you possibly be capable of giving me a ride home?” 

Ben smiles, first with his eyes and then his mouth. “So much more polite than Hux.”

“I’ll remind you that Hux has also killed people whereas I have not.” Something dark flits across Ben’s face and Dom’s sure he’s misspoken. Reminding Ben that all he knows about him is that his alter-ego wants to dominate the galaxy is probably a bad idea.

But, quick as a flash, the expression is one of open friendliness again. “I’d love to give you a ride.” A corner of his mouth creeps up then, an acknowledgment of a double entendre, intended or no. Dom refuses to blush, dammit, but it’s just so easy when your skin has the hue and thickness of rice paper. He distracts his body, hopefully, by putting on the coat. It had been so cold outside when they’d darted out there earlier, but he hadn’t wanted to be the first one to cry time out, especially with Ben wearing only that t-shirt. 

Ben’s vehicle is a brown Ford truck, a tidbit that Dom wishes desperately that he could share with Hux. Of course, he’d have to explain both what a Ford was and what a truck is, which would no doubt suck the comedy right out of the situation. Ben unlocks the door manually and holds it open for him. Again, gentlemanly, and though Dom knows it shouldn’t bother him, he’s starting to worry that Ben’s gentility is placing him in the feminine role. He likes women well enough, about as well as he likes men for all non-bedroom purposes, but he doesn’t want to be seen as one. His desire to avoid this perception does not trump his need to stay out of the snow as he watches from the cushiness of the slowly heating cabin Ben push snow off the windshield with a small blue plastic device. He snoops. Cassette tapes piled into the space beneath the radio, all old 80’s bands, either a repercussion of the ancient media format or of musical predilections. Empty Gatorade bottles scattered around his feet. Sunglasses tucked into the driver’s side visor. An amulet, this Dom actually touches, dangling from the rearview mirror. The middle, purple stone or glass, is a fancy 3 inside a triangle in a circle with little wings of a sort on either side. He doesn’t recognize the symbol. It looks sort of hippyish, so not exactly the kind of thing that Dom has insight about. 

When Ben finally climbs inside, the defroster and his efforts have successfully revealed the road outside the truck. He smiles grandly at Dom, as though he’s successfully rang the bell at a carnival strength game. “Haven’t I seen you before?” he asks, goofy smile accompanying his words. “Maybe in my dreams?”

Dom tsks and rolls his eyes, turning his head to the side window as Ben gets the vehicle in motion, slowly easing through the snow onto the roads. He’s amused anyway, but there’s no telling what kind of precedent it will set if he rewards terrible jokes with laughter, not with Kylo Ren, and probably not with his Earthly version.

“Where am I heading?” asks Ben. 

Dom has memorized the address, of course, and he gives that to Ben, but he also offers to pull up directions on his phone.

Ben waves him off. “I drive for a living, General. I’ll get you there.”

Head against the cold glass, he watches the still snow-filled world. Soon the people in the houses that they pass will begin to rise, nursing hangovers, holding onto their coffee mugs with reluctant glances at piles of empty beer cans, or attempting to ignore the wake-up calls of energetic children by hiding unsuccessfully under blankets. It’s a Twilight Zone world for him right now. For Ben too, he supposes, since he’s also just discovered a man from his imagination. The Ford truck might as well just turn into a spaceship and rocket off the planet, that’s about how the last 6 or so hours have gone. 

“Do you think we’ll dream about each other again? Now that we’ve met?” asks Ben.

The idea tugs fear immediately from his heart. He can’t lose Hux now, needs to know that there is some version of him somewhere that isn’t such a pathetic excuse for a person. A quick glance from Ben, who shouldn’t be doing even that while he’s driving in the snow, and he knows that he’s already shared how he feels about the possibility. Dom hates his own stupid emotive face. 

“It’s been the highlight of my nights lately,” offers Ben. 

“Mine too,” agrees Dom, though it’s an understatement. “And, I don’t know if it will affect the dreams. You said that you’d had the dreams before? Without me in them?”

Ben nods, taking a peek over at his passenger. “Yeah, since I was 11.”

Having those kind of dreams, filled with spaceships and aliens, commanding soldiers and waging intergalactic war, must have been terrific. He’s suddenly so envious that he can barely swallow. 

“And for you, it’s only been a couple months?” confirms Ben.

Dom nods. “The first one I had was visiting the facility where we train the troopers.”

“Was that as dull as the trip to Starkiller Base?” asks Ben with a laugh. “I thought that Kylo was going to blaster himself in the face just to end the boredom.”

Dom remembered being extremely excited by that dream. It was second only to the one in which he’d first seen Ren’s face. He’d felt a kind of pride unrivaled by any of the dreams yet, being the one to build the deadliest weapon ever constructed, something that could take out an entire solar system! Perhaps that shouldn’t have been as elating as it was, but it was just a dream, after all. Probably. He doesn’t remember Ren even being there inspecting Starkiller Base. He has a vague sense that he’d been lurking sulkily, maybe, but having heard Ben’s take on it, that might be shaping what he’s now thinking of as memory. “We loved it,” he says quietly, referring to himself and Hux as two separate people though that’s not the case. Probably.

The ride is too short, even with how slowly Ben’s driven and they pull in front of Dom’s apartment. Ben doesn’t shut off the engine, but looks to him for a clue as to how to proceed next. Dom hears himself ask, “Would you like to come in?” Then he feels a bit daft. It’s dawn and they’ve just met (from a technical perspective, at least). 

Ben smiles, a bit of uncertainty behind the wide lips. “I should probably let you sleep, and get some of my own,” he says. 

It’s perfectly logical to turn down the offer, stupid for Dom to have even made it, but that doesn’t stop the disappointment from creeping into his chest. “Of course.” He lets himself out of the truck stiffly, artificial okayness masking his face and posture. 

“Hey, Hux!” calls Ben before he can close the door. A broad goofy grin crosses Ben’s features when Dom answers to the name; It mixes adorably with his big ears, like he’s just some excited kid. “You wouldn’t mind me just staying a few minutes? Seeing how the general lives when he’s on Earth?”

Despite himself, Dom smiles too. He likes being called Hux and likes more that Ben is offering to come inside. The proud part of himself wants to tell the guy to take a hike, that his feelings are already hurt, but that’s silly and that is a descriptor that Dom has never applied to himself. “I might need convincing that America counts as Earth, but you are welcome to see how I live.”

“Where can I park?”

 

Dom isn’t the kind to bring home random men that he’s met at parties, isn’t even the kind to attend parties for that matter, so he feels massively out of his element unlocking the door to his new flat with Ben behind him waiting for admittance. In a way, it feels like he actually does have Kylo Ren behind him, intimidating, impatient. 

Millicent is, of course, right behind the door as he opens it. She’s considered darting out before, but decided that snow is an enemy far worse than flat boredom. She will often peer past him though, when he comes in, just to check to see if her evil white nemesis is still blocking her path to potential fun adventures. Somehow she manages to miss Ben’s presence until he’s actually crossing over the threshold of the place. Then, what had been a warm kitty greeting becomes nothing at all as she runs off up the stairs to the safety of the cavern beneath Dom’s cheap Walmart bed. So much for the brave Millicent, vanquisher of rubber bands, obstructor of fine literature, and regurgitator of houseplants.

“That was Millicent,” he informs Ben.

“She’s quick,” he comments. 

Dom flips on the built-in front hallway light switch and locks out the cold behind them. Not that it’s warm in the flat; he would never be so wasteful as to leave the heater running when he’s not here, but the building has brick in its construction and soaks the sun up with high efficiency during the daytime hours. He imagines that he’ll know what a pizza feels like come summer. 

He leads the way down the hallway and turns on the kitchen light. He hadn’t really thought about his lack of furniture when he’d invited Ben inside. Mostly what he has is the bed upstairs. It isn’t that he doesn’t have the finances to afford to pick up a couch, a computer desk, those sorts of things. It’s that he’s still been feeling out America. The job itself has been more effort than he’d anticipated. His competency was immediately trusted and the tasks that fill his day are important. Now that they’re both standing there, he realizes the apartment has a mausoleum feel to it and he’s embarrassed to have brought a guest to witness it.

“I haven’t had the chance to buy many furnishings yet,” he lies.

Despite the vastness of the room, Ben stands well within his personal space. “How long have you been here?” he asks, surprise in his voice.

“December 18th.”

“Wait. This year, December 18th? Like, two weeks ago?”

“It feels like longer,” admits Dom. He keeps berating himself for, well, things like not getting furniture, for not having visited all the important city landmarks. To be reminded that it’s not even been a month yet makes him feel better about the way he’s been passing his time in America. 

He can feel Ben’s eyes on him. If he had to guess, he’d say that Ben is looking at him with the same desperate expression he had at the party, eyeing his lips like a hawk would a rabbit. Dom would have let him do practically anything to him then, even inches away from strangers talking and laughing in caricature in order to be heard over an eclectic mix of house, jazz, dubstep, and pop vibrating through the floorboards. He’s far from being an exhibitionist, so that says something about how arousing the situation, sexy dream rival somehow turning out to be real and showing up at the same damned party that he’s attending, was. And now it’s just the two of them.

“Dom?”

He’s actually a little afraid to look, which is ridiculous. He’s just never wanted anything so badly as to have Kylo Ren be real and now he is. He does though, and not just because social conventions dictate that he not join Millicent in hiding under his bed. Ben is smiling at him. It draws out one of his own. “Thanks for inviting me in.” 

“You’re welcome? I mean, it’s just a flat, and well, we know each other, right? In a way.” God, he sounds so nervous.

“Where can we sit?” asks Ben who is acting like a sane person.

Dom looks around. Is the floor really the only place they can sit together? They can’t sit on the floor! What had he been thinking to have invited him here? He’d been thinking with his heart, and a bit with his penis. “I hadn’t got that far in my thinking.”

Ben shrugs. “Where do you sit?” he asks.

“My bed.” He exhales a laugh because it sounds like a pickup line, then bites his lip because he’s pretty sure that even though he personally is absolutely up for a fuck, that Ben isn’t, and that a dismissal of that proposition is in his immediate future.

Ben’s laughs are low and rumbly, like his words, but they seem to come not so much from his lungs as from his eyes which glow with amusement. “Of course.” He looks around the room, probably coming to the same conclusion that the floor appears to be the only spot to sit that isn’t a piece of furniture generally used for fucking. He seems to be energized, maybe a second wind or maybe nervous, Dom’s having a really hard time getting a read on his emotions. When Ben grabs Dom’s hands, he’s startled and suspicious that maybe his space knight isn’t quite right in the head. 

Ben studies the hands carefully before looking soulfully into Dom’s eyes. “I keep expecting you to have gloves on.”

“I’m glad you don’t have on your mask.” He reaches up and touches Ben’s face, remembering when just revealing what was underneath the helmet had made him jerk awake, then, rage about his cruel imagination. He supposes that he doesn’t need blame his own brain for Ren’s appearance. Someday, he’d like the opportunity to rage against Ben’s mother instead, for making such a uniquely sexy creature.

Ben sighs, leaning into the hand. He even closes his eyes with enjoyment. They stand together for a moment just like that, Ben basking and Dom taking in information about eyelashes and lips, cheeks and laugh lines. Then, Ben says, “Okay,” with determination. He looks Dom straight in the eyes, trying to project something with vehemence. “This…” he gestures between them, “is fucking awesome. It’s supernatural and crazy and isn’t something that happens in real life. Right?”

“Right.”

“Right. Well, in real life, I’m a fuck up. I don’t let anyone get close to me because I have some fucked up childhood shit, so I just pick up random guys at bars instead of having real relationships.” That’s the bluntest that Dom’s heard anyone be, might be the most straight-forward anyone beginning a new relationship has ever been. “Yeah, I know this is a totally messed up confession right now, but hear me out. I don’t want to fuck whatever just happened up. The universe just gave me a huge opportunity and I don’t want negative patterns of behavior… Yes, I’ve had a lot of therapy… But, I don’t want negative patterns of behavior to mess that opportunity up. So, I’m going to keep oversharing like I am right now and I am not going to rush into… having…” he laughs nervously. “I’m probably fucking this up trying not fuck this up.”

“You’re not. You sound crazy, but you’re not ruining anything.” The entire odd speech, Dom still hasn’t dropped his hand from Ben’s face. He’s felt Ben’s jaw open and close with his speech and noticed how his body has been nervously shifting its weight from foot to foot. There are times when Dom feels like the most insecure person on the planet. At the moment, he’s runner-up, and that’s a great feeling. He always may appear calm, like he knows exactly what must be done or said, but inside he’s very much like how Ben is acting now. “I understand what you’re trying to say.”

The shoulder drop is an impressively visual display of Ben’s relief. “Good.”

With what feels like a devious smile, Dom says, “If you stay tonight, I promise not to compromise your virtue.”

Ben looks at him dully. “That was pure Hux.”


	16. Ben's Life Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I am super sorry about this, but I've decided to change the order of this and a future chapter. I'm almost done editing the whole fic, so this kind of confusion won't happen again. Instead of letting them sleep, I'm having them stay up a bit first. This was my favorite chapter to write.

If Ben had had his choice of any element to bring to life from his dreams, it would have been Hux, or at least, the feeling that Kylo gets around Hux. He doesn’t give a fuck about space travel or aliens, they’d probably be douchebags like humans. He knows first-hand how using the force just creates too much temptation for exploitation, so while magic sounds like a good idea, it just leads to more people mistreating each other. But Kylo had felt a fascination, and a growing affection and attraction for Hux, something that had slowed the constant stream of internal reproach and resentment. If Hux had been in his dreams earlier, maybe Ben’s father would still be alive, given him something to fixate on that was a little healthier than the blood and the anger, the fact that he would go days without sleep and no one could help him.

He warred with himself while parking and walking back to Dom’s apartment. He can’t mess this up. He needs this too badly. Young Ben needed it too, this miracle. So, he argues about the best course of action. What would his shrink say? Nevermind that, she’d think he’d gone crazy, creating a person, yanking one from REM sleep. What would she say about meeting someone that he truly could share a future with? Normally, if he felt drawn to someone, he’d cut it off after the first or second night. No need to get someone else involved in his mess. And he really is a mess, a Picasso of violent emotions, gnawing guilt, chronic insomnia, and fully embraced hopelessness. Dom doesn’t deserve to have to deal that either, but in the dreams, the megalomaniacal space soldier could handle it. Maybe Dom can as well? 

In the end, he’d followed the flow of things, entering Dom’s apartment with a stern resolve not to rush things but not to run away. He’d shared all of it with Dom, who he could tell had understood, and then cracked a snarky joke. It was a good sign. Now, he’s made himself comfortable underneath the blankets in Dom’s bed, fully clothed, of course, and ready to leave himself open to sharing. He’s got a minor shake on from the fear, but it’s cold as fuck in the room and will be easy to pass off. Well, if Dom rejects him after tonight, then he’ll go back to his guru lifestyle, going through positivity exercises and trying not to take any anger out on the world around him. Ben’s got that down to an art form by this point, is a therapy poster child. 

The word Spartan sounds gaudy next to this room, to this whole apartment which has been so recently rented by his beautiful dream general. There are maybe 20 hangers, all one color, holding up their requisite clothes in a closet with no door. The window has only the blinds that came with it. All the walls are hospital room off-white. It’s not just the room that’s empty, but the whole apartment. How out of place must Dom feel so far from home  _ and _ discovering that some random man has invented him from his dreams? Somewhere there’s a cat under the bed, which pleases Ben, even if he can’t see her. Cats are good luck. He’s not sure if he’s read that or if it’s just something that he’s come up with off the top of his head. Plus, her fur, Millicent’s, matches Dom’s. That’s got to be good luck. 

Dom leaves all of his clothes on too, out of respect, when he climbs into bed next to Ben. He’s shivering a bit too. Ben reaches out to him, wraps his topmost arm over him and pulls him close. “You’re like ice,” he notes. He rubs his hand up and down Dom’s arm to create slightly warming friction. “Does it snow in London?” Ben doesn’t know jack about life in England. The TV has probably lied because he has it in his head that they sit around drinking tea, judging Americans, and reading Jane Austen.

“It does, but not like this. It doesn’t stay on the ground. Well, not often. It is much colder here.” He halts Ben’s moving hand but doesn’t push it away. Maybe he just didn’t care for the sensation. “It rarely drops below 5 degrees.”

“Do you think Millicent will come out?”

“After she sees that you haven’t murdered me, yes. She’s big on using me to test the waters.” Their bodies align nicely in the bed. When he leans his head back, he can see Dom’s face, even if it’s close enough that it looks as though he has one eye. “You’re our first visitor in America.”

Ben laughs. “Since you’ve only been here two weeks!”

“I’d have invited you over sooner if I’d have known you were real.” He pauses. “What an odd sentence.”

Ben hadn’t realized how tired he’s getting until now, cuddled up under blankets. “This bed is perfect. I hate mattresses that are too soft. Bad for your back.” He’s not actually sure, now that he’s said that, if it isn’t some old wives’ tale, but he likes thinking his predilection for firm beds is also healthy.

“Why are you making small talk?” asks Dom. 

Damn, caught out. “I’m nervous.” Dom’s eyes had been closed, but he opens them when he feels Ben craning to examine his face. “I don’t know how to…” It sounds ridiculous to say that he doesn’t know how to connect with another person, because he does. He’s had to hone that particular skill, seeing as how it wasn’t something that came innately to him, but he’s can connect. He has ties now, familial and friendship, and if his love life is a little stunted, that’s what happens to some of the daddy issue carriers, and hopefully, Dom has the patience to deal with his inexperience. “This is new.”

“I’ve never had someone pop out of my dreams before either.” 

“You know what I mean.” Ben doesn’t mean to sound grouchy about it, but it’s hard being so straight forward about your own psychological damage when someone else is trying to be playful about it. 

“When did you first meet Snoke?”

“It is fucking crazy to hear you say that name.” It really does floor him and for a second he’s just blown away by the impossibility of what’s happening. “He’s been manipulating me since I was about 14.”

The words have a heavy quality, both of them realizing the intermingling of the realities for Ben. He’s so tangled up on where Kylo Ren starts and he begins at this point. It’s dangerous, has always been, but in light of the circumstances, Ben doesn’t feel like Dom has much room to balk at that dissonance. “How old are you? Actually, maybe you should just start from the beginning.”  
“The beginning of my life?”

“Yes.”  
“You’re asking me to tell you my life story?” His amusement at the suggestion is tempered by fear. He’s used to, at this point, opening to anyone with a psychology degree, but sharing his past with someone whom he wants to keep close is another situation.

“Well, you are a stranger in my bed. I don’t think it too far-fetched for me to want to know something about you.”

Ben recognizes the haughty attitude, but he’s still feeling skeptical about his oversharing having a positive outcome. “Yeah, something, not everything.”

“Ben, I want to know everything about you.”

Even though they’re producing copious amounts of heat, to the point where Dom has actually stuck his foot out of the covers, Ben shivers a teensy a bit. “That’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever heard,” he whispers. His hand brushes through Dom’s hair, fingers traveling softly down his earlobe. “For you only, General Domnhall Hux MacDougal.”

“You forgot Armitage.”

“Your middle name?”

“Hux’s first.”

“Hux’s first name is Armitage?” Ben laughs. “That sounds so prissy.”

He enjoys the glare that the insult earns. It feels like he’s fishing out the Hux from the real-life version, pulling the sulky uptight bits of him right out into the open where Ben can enjoy them as much as Kylo does. 

“Thoughts on my name aside,” says Dom, testily changing the subject. “I believe you were going to start your autobiography.”

“Okay, okay.” He sighs deeply. “It’s a big thing to ask.”

Dom tilts his head forward, not much needed to close the small distance, and kisses Ben’s mouth. It’s a sweet kiss, one that conveys encouragement. 

Their nighttime lives are entwined and it could very well be that, if this goes right, their daytime lives will become so as well. So, Dom deserves to know what he’s getting into. And, the positivity coach in his brain reminds him, he needs someone that will accept him anyway. If he can’t accept the sign that is Dom just appearing before him, then he doesn’t deserve the opportunity.

Ben says, “I was born November 19th, 1983 in San Diego, California.”

 

 

Most of Ben’s memories start around the age of seven, which is late for children who grow up in healthy, stable households, but about par for the course for children like him, the ones who were not so lucky. He has three memories before that. He’s looking at the ocean and it’s so big and terrifying and he feels so very small and vulnerable. It makes him have to pee, maybe he actually does pee, it’s a fuzzy memory. Then, there’s climbing to the top of a slide because he’d seen an older kid do it. Only, once he gets to the top, he can’t get down. He is convinced that he will die up there. Obviously, he didn’t, though the memory doesn’t include how he got down. The third memory is a bad one, one that probably gobbled up all the others he’d remember if he was in one of those lucky households.

Normal for a kid is whatever they’re used to. So, his father’s long absences, his mother’s drinking to cope with the loneliness, and the fights that they have when he returns are normal. The praise that his father heaps upon him when they touch when his mother isn’t around is normal too. It isn’t something that he talks about, not because he’s afraid of what will happen so much, but it’s like how he was not supposed to point out that the woman at the grocery store who told him he’s adorable looked like an ugly old witch, something that adults don’t like discussing. 

He worries about his parents, wonders what his dad does when he goes off alone and why his mom drinks if it doesn’t make her happy, but mostly, he just lives his life. He’s not unpopular in school, even with his big ears, because he’s tall and fast and loves sports. He’s not very good at spelling, but art is kind of fun, so is gym. He has a best friend named Liam, will until 8th grade when Liam starts going to a different school. There’s a big fluffy white cat a few doors down who sits in his lap if he’s quiet enough. 

In public, and to their friends, Han and Leia are the ideal couple: good-looking, successful in their professional fields, and charismatic in their associations. Knowing who they really are when the house empties or when they climb like sardines into the elderly sportscar that Leia insists they must replace someday becomes a heavy secret in his heart. When he meets his classmates’ parents, he wonders if their mom has thrown a glass at their father’s head, if they’re told how good they are, how wonderful, when they touch their father’s penises. But no, they don’t have the telltale signs that he does. They invite him over to dinner. They don’t have to worry that their father will get a call from a woman who isn’t their mom while they’re eating. When the other kids’ parents let him stay overnight, he doesn’t hear them scream and throw things and then make their bed squeak. He never finds their mothers drinking alone in the dark of the night wishing they’d never met their fathers. 

Around ten years old, the boys at school start talking about sex. Fart jokes become dick jokes. Well, there have always been dick jokes but now they’re in relation to vaginas, because girls’ private parts have suddenly become some kind of mythical end goal, each schoolboy’s Ithica. And what they want from these girls, the things that these boys strategize about, lie about having done, Ben’s already done, with his dad. That’s when the shame really takes hold. It brings along its buddy Rage, an inseparable twosome for him. Seemingly overnight, Ben changes. He starts fights with other boys, even beats the shit out of a girl which lands him in way more trouble. He starts plucking the legs off bugs and then leaving them on classmates’ desks as “warnings.” He wakes up sometimes in puddles of his own piss. Nothing seems fun anymore because everything and everyone seems to judge him, to yodel out that he’s not normal, that he’s not like the others. He’s scared of himself, afraid of when his vision just becomes red and he wants to tear the limbs off the other kids like he does the bugs. 

The school suspends him a bunch, but Han and Leia have work and aren’t home during the day. With the alone time, the negative thoughts percolate. He jerks off a lot, but that makes him angry because he’s not supposed to have had his first orgasm with his dad. He digs through trash cans, snooping on the neighbors, suddenly obsessed with uncovering others’ secrets to make his own seem less monumental. This extends to sneaking around eavesdropping on conversations when he can. His success as a ninja is hampered by his body odor since he resists showering now. He’s thirteen and puberty is changing him. Every part of him is greasy, like he’s turning not into a man but a french fry. He begins to dream about cleaving enemies in two with a sword made of light, of forcing people to obey him using just his mind. There are starships, big cold warehouses in space that leave his bones feeling hollow, and aliens who want to stop him, but are too weak, too insignificant in the grand scheme of life.

Han and Leia have given up trying to fix him, they’re just waiting out the phase or maybe they’re just too absorbed in their own worries; he’s been too oblivious in his own shit to notice, but Han’s been smuggling contraband shit across the Mexican border. In San Diego, they’re certainly not the only ones. And he’s been doing it for some time, but soon he’s gonna get busted. Leia seems to sense it because she tries to talk him into just focusing on his legitimate business, selling components for race cars. He makes damn good money at it because he can talk anyone into anything, of that Ben is a shining example.

By the time that Han gets locked up, he hasn’t put his hands on Ben in years, either scared off by the change in his personality, repulsed by his new grotesque appearance, or smart enough to know that Ben won’t be so compliant anymore. It doesn’t matter how long it's been, though, since the damage is already done. Ben can’t get off without thinking about it and he can’t stop getting off because he’s fourteen and just watching a Brad Pitt movie is at least a three-shot event. With his dad gone for good, he has that much extra time to get into trouble. He takes up shoplifting, bullying some of the classmates that he finds particularly cute, punishing them for his attraction. 

Leia, at her wit’s end for how to deal with him, sends him to live with his Uncle Luke who runs a yoga retreat on Mt Wachusett. Ben resents it in a way that fuels the rage demon inside him; he feels cast out, abandoned. Uncle Luke is the quintessential crazy old hippie. He wears robes and meditates and stacks rocks even in between retreats when there aren’t any yoginis to observe or learn from him. He’s all peace and Ben is all rage. At first, Ben can’t take him seriously. He contradicts everything that his uncle says and deliberately leaves the chores assigned him undone. But, over time, something begins to grow inside him. It’s a seed of peace planted in part by the mindset of his uncle, the beauty of the surroundings, the yoga which he resents accidentally learning through observation, and being away from his volatile, destructive parents. As hard as he tries to fight it, the lessons that Uncle Luke teaches are sinking in. He finds himself practicing moments of meditation when no one can see him. He takes long walks through the forest. Even spritzes down the mats with diluted rubbing alcohol at the end of the days when they have yoginis and helps chop up vegetables for soup with Mr. Antilles in the kitchen until Uncle Luke notices, and then Ben feels caught and stops. 

Leia calls every week diligently. Ben feels too betrayed to talk to her, even leaves the room while she’s on the phone, but Uncle Luke tells him what she’s said. He always says that he doesn’t fucking care, using the word fuck not as much for emphasis as to reinforce that he is no longer subject to parental rules about things like swearing. Leia is working with a doctor and a support group for alcohol addiction. She says she’s doing well getting sober. She says she’s no longer talking to Han. Uncle Luke, faithfully reports that, in her words, she’s letting the cheating criminal fucker rot alone in that jail like he deserves. Child Ben, the one that’s almost no longer there, wants to defend his dad, but is anything she said untrue? Would she say worse if she knew what he’d done to Ben? Does she suspect what he’d done? Ben thinks he knows his mother well enough that, while she may have been willing to tolerate a lot of bullshit from Han, she’d have had his fucking balls if she’d known that he’d molested their son. Maybe that’s wishful thinking because Leia never had a lot of resistance to Han’s charms; maybe that uncrossable line never existed.

It’s lonely being away from other kids his age and he hasn’t seen any television in seven months, so he does find himself restless even at the same time that he finds himself becoming more pacified. The nightmares lessen but remain. It feels like he’s at war with himself. The nightmares tell him what he can be and who he isn’t now. Here, this place with Uncle Luke, he is vulnerable, exposed. What he’d been doing back in San Diego was protecting himself, scaring off those that would want to hurt him. Here, he’s becoming sissified, finding his connection to nature, and his newly forming yoga muscles can’t protect him from the mental harm others want to do. If his friends could see him sitting in lotus position, moving with only his breaths, like the trees around him undulating with the wind, they would think him weak, lame, and pathetic, as he’d seen his uncle at first, fodder for mockery.

He gets an idea in his head that he can’t shake, the voice of Kylo Ren’s master, Snoke, echoes a lot in there, stirs up thoughts that don’t feel like his own. So, in the middle of the night, he steals the keys to the retreat shuttle and two sad 20 dollar bills and heads down the mountain towards civilization. He’s not even sure as he leaves if he’s planning on coming back, sneaking the keys back onto their hook and feigning ignorance about the missing 40 bucks, or if he’s running away. 

He intends to go into Boston, hit up some bars and see if any are willing to serve a tall but still obvious teenager. His intentions don’t mean a thing because somewhere along the twisting roads of the mountain which he speeds down, he loses control of the van. Like his memories from when he was little, what happens after he feels the steering wheel not go where he’d been directing it go, is gone. He’s only got the memories of being in the hospital, of Leia at his bedside talking with nurses or reading or fetching him something to drink. The images are candlelight flickers, not cohesive narratives. He thinks of her again as mom, which he hasn’t done for years. He’s 15 when they remove bits of tree from his brain. 

It takes a long time but when he finally gets out of the hospital, he returns to living with Leia. Uncle Luke says he forgives him, but it doesn’t seem like it. Ben figures he’s burned that bridge; he tells himself he doesn’t care. His mom has, to his surprise, stopped drinking, though he supposes it’s easier with Han still locked up. They reach an odd equilibrium for a while. She no longer treats him like a child but a grownup who shares her home. Ben doesn’t treat her badly, but he’s still calling her Leia to her face. He no longer feels that deep inner peace, but he isn’t fantasizing about slitting anyone’s throat either, at least not while he’s awake.

His dreams are still drenched in blood and power and death. In his dreams, his father is a space smuggler, which seems more glamorous in space somehow, and his mother is a princess of a destroyed planet, instead of a campaign manager who got pushed out when her husband got thrown in the slammer. He’s an apprentice to an evil dark magic user, undergoing his own physical and mental tortures in the pursuit of becoming so powerful that he needn’t ever feel fear again (and so that the grotesquely ugly wizard will praise him - a powerful real-life analog he won’t see for several years). He is a powerful warmonger, hiding his true identity beneath an intimidating black mask, able to harness pure energy to use as a weapon. While the dreams all revolve around his Kylo Ren character, they jump around different parts of his life, so that Ben doesn’t know the full shape of his story.

He makes friends with the goth kids, starts smoking with them in between classes, and gets Leia to buy him a long black trench coat that he wears even on the hottest Southern Californian days. He falls in love with painting through his art class and in lust with a guy in it named John. They’re in contradictory cliques and have nothing in common, but for a few weeks, Ben’s tongue gets the gymnastic workout of his life behind the auto shop building after school. He gets off thinking about slitting John’s throat and strangling him with one of his father’s belts. 

Any semblance of normality that Ben has been enjoying evaporates as quickly as the resolute “let the fucker rot” once Han is released from jail. The rage moves back in along with him. Ben picks fights with guys much bigger than him; it feels better when he wins those. Inspired by the movie, his friends start their own Fight Club but it gets ugly when no one wants to really fight him, when he keeps taking it too far, and eventually, they ditch him, pretending to be world-wearied and dangerous while being afraid of the desperation they see in his eyes and his actions. He sneaks out at night, heads anywhere there’s music loud enough to drown out the things that Snoke says about him and his dream family. Snoke knows that Han Solo never loved anyone more than himself, that Princess Leia sees the dark side in him and fears it. He feels like Kylo Ren stuck in the body of Ben Organa, stuck in a life that is too small and weak for him. 

There’s more than enough mischief for him to get into on the San Diego streets at night. Drugs are an obvious path, but one he, amazingly, manages to avoid. He already feels roided out as it is. The real gangs won’t take him seriously because he’s a scrawny white goth kid, but he finds a wannabe one, one that embraces guys like him, one that uses his anger for their purposes. He doesn’t give a fuck what color skin his target is, what their accent sounds like, but it matters to his new family and so he puts on a good front spewing out the slurs that they use like weapons. He delights in the feel of his large fists cracking against bones. Sometimes the targets get hits on him too, though they’re always outnumbered so they never win, but he likes it when he gets hurt too. It teaches him, reminds him of his training with Snoke. Snoke can make him feel like he’s going to die using only the force and so Kylo Ren becomes desensitized to the fear of death. Ben isn’t yet, but he’s trying. 

Ben is not quite eighteen when he kills his father. He’s hanging out in the back room of a bar called The Eisley with his violent, racist gang. There’s seven of them there, four packing, luckily not Ben. They’re regurgitating their pathetic social fearmongering crap when Han comes in, raging like a vengeful angel. He puts his hands on Ben’s shoulders and says he’s taking him home. He’s only tried to touch him once since getting out of jail, a platonic welcome back hug attempt that had failed immediately and adamantly, and it hurts because it feels good and also wrong, something that will always be denied him because of his father’s actions. It feels good that his father is here because he’s showing that he cares about his safety, because he’s saying things like he doesn’t want Ben to ruin his life, doesn’t want him to hurt others. “I know why you’re doing it and I know it’s my fault,” Han says. It’s what he’s wanted to hear but so much later that he would’ve liked and he doesn’t want Han to be saying these things, not where all these vipers around him can hear. The gang watches the interaction, actions paused to see what Ben does. Ben is not ready to forgive and, even if he was, he couldn’t do so in this bar with them watching. So, with embarrassment and anger, he shoves Han away, calls him something horrible, tells him to take himself home. 

The gang rallies around Ben, defending their own, perhaps retaliating for the things done by their own fathers. They taunt Han, shove at him, call him an old man. Han’s done time and isn’t afraid of the group around him, but he should be, because there’s a new recruit, Bob Fett, whose own unhinged behavior makes Ben look like Uncle Luke by comparison. He gets up in Han’s face, starts yelling. It comes to blows and Ben can’t help interfering; he doesn’t actually want to see Han get hurt, whether he deserves it or not. He tries to break it up, yells at Bob to cool off, that it’s no big deal, but Han’s yelling shit of his own, things about the unstable skinhead in the green hoodie that Bob doesn’t like, and a gun comes out. 

Ben’s blood flows like ice when he sees the gun aimed at his father’s head. “No!” he yells and reaches for it, ready to wrestle it out of the guy’s fucking hand, ready to put himself in front of it if he has to. There’s not much time to think about smart things to do, instinct is all he has because there’s not enough time for anything but adrenaline-fueled actions. Later in court, Bob will claim that he was just trying to scare Han off and that Ben bumped his arm, flicking the trigger. Ben doesn’t think so, but can’t say with absolute certainty that it didn’t. What he knows is that the gun fires, bang terribly loud and horrifyingly final, and then Han’s head jerks back and his body falls. 

The only nightmares that Ben will ever regularly have aside from the space ones are the ones around these moments. He hears the gun, sees his father fall, and watches the teenage criminals scatter, leaving only a bleeding dead man and his anguished son behind. Han’s face is covered in red though the hole itself is small like the caliber of the gun. Ben experiences nearly every emotion at that moment. Mostly though, there’s utter consuming regret. This feeling will encompass every action and every thought, growing more and more intense until it feels like he should be able to will time travel real by just desire alone. He reaches for his father for the first time in years and cries over his body.

The legal process following the shooting is a protracted nightmare. Ben numbly consults with his lawyer, makes his testimony, and awaits the verdict as the prosecution does its best to lock Ben away. He doesn’t sleep much at all. Leia stays away, doesn’t visit him and doesn’t bail him out. When he sees her in the courtroom, she looks twenty years older overnight. He probably does too. He spends his eighteenth birthday in a cell. In the end, they don’t charge him with accessory to murder. A small miracle. Even he doesn’t believe he’s not guilty. 

He has nothing, no father, no mother, no money, no home, no job. The only thing he has is the freedom that he doesn’t even think he deserves. He calls a cousin, one that last he’d heard was living with Uncle Luke. He verbally prostrates himself in front of her. “I need help,” he tells her. “I need to start seeing a shrink. I need a place to stay while I work on this. Please. Talk to Uncle Luke for me, please.” It isn’t that he’s too cowardly to call Uncle Luke directly, but that every phone call he’s put into him since the shooting has gone unanswered and unreturned.

Rey is dealing with her own shit, having recently found out she was adopted, and while she could be kinder about the inconvenience of fighting on the behalf of someone she’s only seen a handful of times over the years, she does talk to their Uncle. Ben sleeps on park benches and panhandles for food money for three weeks before his uncle’s new yoga retreat shuttle shows up. When Uncle Luke hugs him, Ben weeps openly in his arms. All of his bravado is gone, all of his hangups about others’ perceptions are gone too. All that’s left is an unwashed mess of trauma and sadness. 

He launches into his new start with a passion, eager to create a future for himself. He works with a shrink three times a week at first. He does daily yoga and meditation, investing himself in every class that his uncle runs. He keeps a journal. He returns to the long walks among the trees. He takes his prescribed SSRI medicine and smokes a little weed before bed to help him sleep. To pay Uncle Luke back for his kindness, he helps out around the retreat, assisting Ralo in keeping the fine wood floors clean and waxed, offers pose suggestions to the yoginis, and anything else he can think of. Rey has a job but she comes in around sunset and they talk about her life. She tells him that he can share or not share anything he wants with her, but he does enough talking about himself during his therapy; he prefers to be silent and listen to her. He realizes for the first time that he never listened to anyone, not really, that he was just always hoping that they’d want to listen to him. 

After months of this healing lifestyle, Ben finally tells Uncle Luke about the things he and his father did when he was little. The therapist says to share only in his own time and, though the time feels right, he’s so worried about not being believed. Uncle Luke looks like he might cry, he and Han had been friends once, their friendship predating Han and Leia’s romance, but he doesn’t seem doubtful of Ben’s story. Instead, the knowledge of Ben’s years-long turmoil connects with this new information, the horrible deeds of a man with no business of being a father, fits like a puzzle piece, so that Uncle Luke knows there is truth to his words. They pray together, to no god in particular since Uncle Luke is a pantheist, holding hands and asking that the universe accept Ben’s heartfelt desire to change and grant him the ability to forgive his father. 

Uncle Luke begins paying him to actually lead some of the yoga classes. His body is strong and lean and flexible. His mind responds well to the medication and the healthy living. He no longer hears Snoke’s negative talk in his head, knows that it was him all along, a pessimistic and narcissistic side of himself. His nightmares less frequently feature Han’s death and more often he returns again to the space dreams, the need for power still demonstrating itself in his subconscious where he doesn’t even feel it anymore while he’s awake. 

He lives there on Mt. Wachusett with his uncle and his cousin for four years. When he does leave, it’s not in a stolen van, but in a clunker car paid for from some of the money he’s set aside teaching yoga. He’s been happy there, but it’s time for him to build a life of his own, ready to test his new found coping techniques with the bustle of city life and the pressure of adult independence. He starts as a painter, not the kind of painting that he’s enjoyed for years with little brushes upon canvas, but with rollers against big slabs of drywall. His apartment is a shithole but it’s his shithole and his coworkers, all blue collar with blue vocabularies, sometime join him for a beer there even though it’s small and has a half-hearted heater. He picks up guys in bars or on dating websites. None of them really stick, but many are pleasant enough short-term company.

After a few years of that, the owner of Empire Glass, who he’s befriended while working on various projects, offers him a delivery job. He hauls glass during the day and then paints or hits up the sports bar six blocks away from the house he’s renting, a much bigger space than his first Boston apartment. He has lots of friends who barely know him, but who feel close to him because they’ve told him everything. He jokes that with his big ears, he’d had no choice but to become a good listener. 

Finally, Ben starts dreaming about a green-eyed megalomaniac that makes him realize which vital component his life has been missing. 

“‘m not a megalomaniac,” mumbles Dom, barely awake but still holding on because he really does want to know everything, has stuck with every stupid word that Ben’s said. That’s actually part of the reason why he’d tossed out the insulting word, to see if Dom is still listening. They’re spooning now and he hasn’t been able to check for open eyes for a while. But he was listening, and it makes Ben feel special, even while feeling terribly exposed at everything just being out there, memories woven like cobwebs around the corners of the room, coating everything but lightly.  

“Maybe not you,” assures Ben, kissing the red hair and the warm head underneath it. “But your dream you.”

“Hux is just….thorough.” Dom can pretend he’s quite different from Hux but here is, seconds away from snoring, and still sassy as a Siamese cat. 

There’s no clock in the room and the day is too gray to judge the time more accurately than “day.” It’s the first day of a new year and the first page of a new chapter in his life. He’s big spooning Dom, holding as tightly as a seatbelt. He intends to do something like that emotionally for as long as he’s allowed. “Do you want to sleep, General?”

Dom grunts, rubs his face against Ben’s arm. “Exist when I wake up.” 

“I promise,” says Ben, happy that this Hux is capable of sweetness. “Try and find me in your dreams.” 

He doesn’t expect to be able to sleep. He does that rarely enough in his own bed. Not that it matters. He slept the night before last, plenty for someone with practically professional insomnia. He closes his eyes, though, lets them moisturize behind his lids. Dom doesn’t smell like much, other than the product in his hair. His skin has a little bit of warm body smell mixed with something he’d describe as sanitized; he probably uses a strong antibacterial soap or something. Ben listens as Dom’s breathing deepens, his lungs and ribs rising, pushing Ben’s arm up and down with the inhale and exhale process. 

He creates a gratitude bubble in his mind and tosses it to the universe. Then, he makes a wish, like he’s just blown out the candles of his birthday cake. “I wish that Domnhall Armitage Hux MacDougal would fall in love with me,” he thinks, hearing the voice in his head not as his current voice, but as the childish one he had before it dropped. His silliness makes him smile and he kisses the red hair again before relaxing, slowly dropping off into a light, intermittent sleep next to Dom.


	17. Hux Stays Up Past his Bedtime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If you read chapter 16 prior to 1/30/19, then you'll need to re-read it. I did a little ONE TIME chapter swap

Hux can’t get enough of the view. In that cold blue sphere, he sees the future of the First order and his own life, feels the upcoming success, perhaps prematurely, but still breath-catchingly close. Starkiller Base. More dangerous than even the Death Star. Soon, he’ll be the one who gives the command for it to fire. It will be his voice that will stop the galaxy from all its mindless chatterings, bring attention to what they’ve worked so hard to accomplish, and still the chaos left in the wake of the Empire’s fall. Hux will bring order to the galaxy. 

Is it any wonder then, that he’s here, long after his shift has ended, on the control deck, looking up from his datapad occasionally to admire the planet and all it stands for? He’s reading for pleasure, the Battle of Amarin. While he normally finds stories of pirates to be a touch too romantic for his taste, Hux has always had a soft spot for Xer VIII. He’s read about this battle before, thinks he may actually be somewhat of an authority on all things Xer VIII, hours of devoted reading as a child having left the knowledge in his head even now as an adult. 

Beside him, the figure appears again, the one that annoys him, though perhaps less since they’d shared what most would consider a bonding moment in the exercise facilities. Instead of lashing out, demanding to know why he’s being hovered over, he waits. If Ren must always be so preposterously quiet, then he can as well. He does not always have to allow his impatience to show. 

His stillness pays off… eventually. “Are you off-duty?” The helmet asks, morphing Ren’s natural voice into something deeper, breathier.

“I’ve been off duty for some time. So, I suggest, that if there’s something you need, you speak with Yaaja.” He’s being rude on purpose, but he’s curious why Ren is asking. It isn’t as though he ever comes to Hux with requests or complaints, so this is unusual. 

For a long moment, because nothing can ever be fast or simple with Kylo Ren, Hux waits for a response. If he could read his facial expressions, then maybe Hux could help push the conversation along. 

“I was considering playing goothball again tonight.”

“Is that so?” Hux asks without a flicker of interest in his voice. “I can’t imagine why you’d think that I’d care about this upcoming gym visit.”

“No?” asks Ren, his voice adopting a similar snarky tone. “It seems then, that losing five of seven matches is enough to put you off the game forever?”

Hux spares only the corners of his eyes to glance at the hulking black-clad irritant. It isn’t as though he can tell anything from looking, but he hopes that he’s appropriately conveying his emotions. “I realize, Ren, that you may not think highly of me, but I would hope that you wouldn’t think me susceptible to childish attempts of goading.” As usual, thirty seconds of speaking with Ren and he’s already lost the carefree mood he’d been enjoying for hours. 

“Well it isn’t as though I can appeal to your fun-loving side.” 

Hux snorts, can’t help it. “Even I can enjoy fun. It’s built into the word’s definition.”

“But you are… disinclined to have fun tonight?” 

Hux wants to remark about the word choice, one that he knows that he himself uses. In his youth, he was often told that he came across as snobby, in part because of his vocabulary, though it probably had more to do with not having the least interest in playing with the other children. They’d all been so loud and chaotic. He’d hated children even when he was one.

“Consider me skeptical that playing goothball with you would be fun.”

“Because it’s too challenging.” Not a question.

Hux groans. “Isn’t there anyone else on this ship you can annoy?” He already knows the answer, that he is Ren’s personal raw nerve of choice. Everyone else thinks that Ren is some untouchable sorcerer. “Fine, but we’re only playing best two of three this time. I’d like to get adequate rest before my next shift.”

 

 

The declaration proves itself to be false. Hux himself calls for just one more...twice. Unjustly, he loses again, despite his best efforts. The cocky look on Ren’s face is nearly unbearable. Last time he’d at least had the excuse of being out of practice, but now he’s just an inferior player. 

“Fine! The night is yours,” Hux announces, resisting the urge to throw his racquet like an idiot, like Ren. He wipes at his forehead, his wrist coming back with the sweat of exercise and effort. They’re both panting and Hux can tell that his face is red.  

Ren smiles. “Did you want to accuse me of cheating?”

Smartass. “No, I want to accuse you of being an affliction. You, you overgrown child, are a bane.”

Hux doesn’t have to be a good loser, because he doesn’t often do it. Rather than Ren getting angry at his outburst, he continues smiling and actually looks a touch prouder, if such a thing is possible. It’s well within his rights as victor to be intolerably smug, Hux would be if their situations were reversed. In a way, it’s better, his being smug. If Ren instead opted for good sportsmanship, then Hux would really feel like a failure, like someone who actually needed pity. 

He flutters his gym shirt, allowing air to circulate against his chest. He’d gone back to his quarters to change before the game, favoring his clothes to the offerings that the gym keeps in stock. He can tell himself all he wants that the droids clean the clothes the same way, but there’s something about the idea of sweating in someone else’s previously sweated upon clothing that flips his stomach. He prefers his own shower as well, for similar reasons, and right now sounds like a good time to indulge in that activity. 

While replacing his racquet into the cage that holds the equipment, he hears Ren’s voice but can’t make out the words. “What was that?”

“We should do this more. Your aim is good but you’re reflexes are as slow as a dewback.” Ren has stripped off his shirt, obviously having less hangups about the public facilities than himself. Hux frowns at the exposed skin. Would his crew be surprised to learn that Kylo Ren has nipples, a belly button? Probably. They probably think he was born of the force or some such nonsense, maybe hatched by Snoke. When he’s stripped down like this, freckles dotting his solid frame, he looks like just a man, an unexpectedly fit man. His regular ensemble, all black thick fabric with layers and flowing movement, hides the unreasonably broad chest and muscled arms too well. Hux had noticed before, of course, the last time they played when Ren had been in a sleeveless top, but it’s lewder without anything disguising his build. Hux finds him less easy to hate like this, with body and face exposed.

Ren’s jaw tightens when he notices that Hux is sizing him up, bracing himself for insults maybe. There’s nothing wrong with Ren’s appearance, though. His ears are large, as is his nose, but it’s not unattractive, those features. On the contrary, if his personality was less repulsive, he might be, what? Not his type, certainly, but an option. Yet, repulsive isn’t even the right word, because here Hux is in the gym again even though he hadn’t even been in the mood to play. No, Ren is just… he’s a lot effort.  

“Would it be more rude of me to read your mind now or for you to keep staring at me?” asks Ren. There’s an undercurrent of threat to the tone of his voice, beneath the overt playfulness. It occurs to Hux that Ren is feeling self-conscious. It’s surprising. There are levels to this man that he doesn’t understand. Failure to understand an enemy is a spectacular way to lose to one. 

“Do you shower here?”

Ren looks wary at the seeming subject change. “I have before.”

“I prefer my own shower.” He sounds spoiled again, but, as he reminds himself, Brendol isn’t around to correct the behavior. “Thank you for the matches.” 

He receives only a nod from Ren and then he leaves, feeling worn out. By the time he reaches his quarters, his sweat has dried and the overreaction to his loss has fizzled away. His body feels good, even tired, humming as it is from the physical activity. As he showers, he considers the moment when he’d been weighing Ren’s looks and personality. No wonder Ren had felt judged, defensive. He’d even called Hux out for it, said that he could be rude too. And certainly the things he’d been thinking hadn’t been complimentary, not entirely anyway, but he’d felt that acknowledging what he was doing would only have been more insulting. 

The Finalizer distributes one soap to the crew for the whole showering process, hair and body. Hux has bought more for himself, preferring not to smell like an x-wing after being power washed. He’s had a cut recently and he enjoys running shampoo through the sharp ends. 

Ren never behaves as he should. That’s it in a nutshell, the primary reason why Hux just gets so exasperated. He doesn’t like unpredictability, especially in such a powerful individual. Perhaps Hux could be a positive influence, demonstrate to him how to operate within established parameters. Or maybe Ren would turn him into an asshole. Well, more of one. It isn’t as though any good side of himself has been brought out by the sith’s presence, other than an increased frequency of physical fitness. Usually, he feels a spectrum between mild irritation and all-out rage when Ren’s around. Even tonight, during what should have been an amiable few games, he’d been growing increasingly frustrated at his inability to play as well as he knows he’s capable, and misdirecting the anger at Ren who was only doing what he himself was trying to do.

Perhaps he should try to extend a bit more patience towards Ren. Or, perhaps he should decline any future offers of goothball. His brain feels confused about their interactions as of late, Ren inviting him to the gym, popping his shirt off as though he has nothing to hide when he spends 95% of his time in a giant mask, and then there’s the constant staring thing that he does, as though constantly inspecting Hux, like he’s working out a puzzle.

Hux shuts off the water and dries completely before stepping out of the small metal rectangle. It’s past his usual lights out time and it feels a bit deviant. He puts on drawstring pants and a loose fitting top with a wide neckline. When he slips into his robe, a fuzzy blue thing, he experiences a sated, comfortable feeling that extends throughout his tired body. 

Ren dragging him to the gym was a good idea, even if he also would have preferred to staying in with his stories of adventure in the depths of space. Ren’s most likely lying down himself by now, having washed off in those disgusting communal showers. He’d looked surprised by Hux’s quick exit from the gym. Perhaps the self-conscious idiot thought it had something to do with his half-naked body, like Hux was put off by him or something.

In the dark, Hux’s eyebrows knit together. Why is he still thinking about Ren? He doesn’t like the implications. He decides that he will definitely curtail his engagement of sports with Kylo Ren. It’s too confusing, trying to make sense of his antics and his own reaction to them. Best to just avoid the frequently frustrating and infrequently appealing wizard. There are other, more straightforward goothball opponents that he can find, ones that don’t pester his mind even when they aren’t around. He intends, as a matter of fact, to avoid Ren altogether, though that’s proven impossible in the past. 


	18. Breakfast in Bed

Ben’s at school. He and Liam are behind the red brick wall that kids play handball against. The back, though, tends to have graffiti on it, the markers of local teens who think they’re badass. Ben can’t read the graffiti, but he tries to. Liam gets his attention by showing him a frog. He looks at the frog. “Does it talk?” he asks Liam.

“Of course it talks! Why would I show you a frog that doesn’t talk?”

It doesn’t talk though. In fact, the frog is dead. He picks up a stick and pokes at it. It hops away. Liam gets mad at him for having caused the dead talking frog to get away. Ben watches Liam run off after it, but he doesn’t care. He knows that he has to get moving if he’s going to catch the ice cream truck before his parents get home.

 

 

The music of the ice cream truck jingles in his mind, the melody of childhood, and the image of Liam, who he hasn’t thought about in years, floats like a projection in the forefront of his mind as he wakes up from the dream. Normally it’s the space dream or nothing at all, mundane REM manifestations evaporating into the ether of forgotten thoughts before he even opens his eyes. But he remembers this one, it stands out for its simplicity, for its lack of torture and destruction.

Throughout the day he’s slept in dribs and drabs, clutching Dom tightly to him, pleased at his persistent existence, and then rolling over, drifting just enough to jerk himself awake. He has no idea what time it is, the sky dark from the dreary winter. The last stretch of sleep felt longer though, more fulfilling. It’s probably evening. Ben feels warm at different points in his body and cold at others. His arm is like ice, but his back and right leg are toasty and he feels like there’s weight to both warm spots. It could be another person. Someone that Ben had taken home from the party thinking that he was Hux. He could have had a complete psychotic break in which he convinced himself that some strange good-looking redhead was his dream good-looking redhead, then gone home with someone. What if he’d also killed the stranger and carried on the conversation last night with a corpse?!

Having reached peak freakout, Ben opens his eyes. It’s a plain white wall with no artwork. Okay, not his room. He turns slowly from being on his left side to on his back. As he does, someone in the bed shifts next to him. That’s good. Not a corpse. The warm weight on his leg also moves, which is disturbing. He looks down and sees orange fur. Millicent!

“She’s a heat hoarder,” mumbles Dom, his voice cracking a bit from sleep. “Be glad you’re not waking up with her ass in your face.”

“Yes!” Ben brings his fist up to his chest in a gesture of triumph. He turns his head and positively beams at Dom. “You still exist!” He doesn’t even mind that the look on Dom’s face says plain as day, “I’m in bed with a moron,” which is actually impressive considering his eyes are still closed.

Ben sits up, takes in the moment. Millicent has moved over to Dom’s feet since his own are too erratic with wakefulness.

“How do you feel about that?”

“Existing?” asks Dom incredulously and still groggy. He must not be used to burning the candle at both ends. “It’s alright.”

“No!” He twists his arm in a weird way in order to fluff at the red hair. “I still exist too. Last night. We really did meet figments of our own imagination in real life!” When he gets no response, Ben nudges at Dom’s shoulder. “Hey, figment, wake up.”

“Oh my god,” groans Dom. He removes the pillow from under his head and sticks it atop his face. “You’re even more obnoxious in the morning!”

I think it’s afternoon.”

An eye peers at him from under the pillow. “I believe it. I feel like I’ve got a hangover, but I haven’t.”

Millicent decides then that it’s time to scale the mountain of her owner. She’s a sleek cat, exactly as nimble as felines are supposed to be. True to what Dom had cautioned Ben about, she sits square on her owner’s neck, her rope-like tail rapping against his face.

Ben laughs.

“This is how she lets me know that her food dish is empty.”

“Do you expect me to do that as well? Because I’m pretty hungry myself and I don’t know if we’ll both fit.”

“Agh,” replies Dom, obviously not ready to be a host for the day.

With a similar deftness to the cat, Ben swoops up Millicent and gets out of bed. “Come on Millie, let’s see if we can’t find food for us both. Master Domnhall needs some more beauty sleep.” It’s presumptuous to just go rifling through Dom’s cupboards downstairs and he would never normally do that with someone he’d gone home with, but there’s more staying power to this new relationship, and so he pads his way down with bare feet to the kitchen. Millicent seems eager to get out of his arms until she notices her proximity to the fridge, then she just seems inquisitive about the new vantage point. She climbs from his arms to his shoulder, sitting as easily on that as she had Dom’s head earlier.

He opens each of the cupboards, her head peeking forward at each new revelation. Most of the cupboards are either completely empty or have a maximum of five items, except for the boxed food stuffs cupboard. Here he finds many boxes of the same things. Not exactly big on variety, he notes. The fridge has similar contents. Millicent jumps down in order to most efficiently beg for milk. Still not seeing the cat’s food, he checks the cupboard above the washing machine (which for some reason is in Dom’s kitchen?) and he’s hit pay dirt, with stacks of kitty cans, labels facing a uniform direction.

She yowls while he fiddles with the pull-tab and finally deposits the foul-smelling glop down into her dish. One mouth fed in the MacDougal house. For the two humans, he puts together two bowls of blueberry yogurt and two small plates with lunch meat rolled around chunks of mild cheddar cheese and buttered bread. He thinks it’s not too bad of a meal he’s thrown together, especially when factoring in that Dom doesn’t even have to get out of bed to eat it.

Ben looks fondly at the lump of sleeping man before giving it a thump with his hand. “Breakfast is ready.”

Dom stirs. “You know, I’m usually a morning person, not that you have any reason to believe me.”

Ben shrugs. “Well, it’s not morning, so you’ve got that as an excuse.” He isn’t bothered by the display of lethargy, knows that if Dom’s anything like his dream counterpart, he needed the sleep.

Dom sits up, lovely eyes watching as he sets down the bowls and plates, arranges them on the bed, then shuts the door, keeping Millicent out. “You made breakfast. Thank you.” He sounds truly grateful.

“No problem,” says Ben. Then, as Dom looks around, he realizes what he forgot. “I forgot the silverware. I’ll be right back!” He finds the silverware in the drawer beneath the microwave, thinks to grab a few napkins while he’s at it.

The food is still untouched when he returns, Dom having used the restroom while he was downstairs. He’s still standing, stretching his arms up over his head. They smile at each other. “Good afternoon,” Ben says.

“Good afternoon, Ben.”

He likes his name a little bit more when Dom says it. He invades Dom’s personal space then, though he doesn’t seem to mind the arms looping around his waist. He tries for a kiss, but is rebuffed, Dom turning his head away.

“You don’t want to kiss me?” he blurts. Now Dom knows all the horrible things that he’s done in his life. How could he possibly expect the man to just forget all of that? If Dom rejects him right now, he might as well just join a fucking monastery because he can’t imagine coming across another man that he wants to kiss as much as the one in front of him, lower back beneath his forearms, ass ungrabbed beneath the flat of his palms.

Dom nods. “I do. Very much actually. But…” Ben tilts his head, like a dog hearing a super high note, not wanting to miss any stipulations that Dom has. “I’d like to brush my teeth first. And, it would be silly to do so right before eating breakfast.” What he’s saying makes sense. Ben’s been able to piece together, from the aligned cat food labels, to the sparkling clean shower, to the key hook adhered to the wall by the front door, that his new love interest either has OCD or is borderline. 

“Let’s eat, then. Maybe you could tell me your life story.”

“I’m not sure. Mine hasn’t been nearly as interesting as yours.”

  
“Considering what I shared with you, that's a good thing.”

They climb back underneath the covers, being extra careful not to send the food flying, and stack up the dishes on top of their stomachs, leaning back against the wall behind them. It’s pleasant, to be sharing this moment, even if his attempt at making a meal was half-assed. It makes it a little sweeter that the kiss is on the horizon.

“Should I be as detailed as you were?” asks Dom.

“Debrief me, General,” says Ben with a nod. He can almost hear the eye rolling beside him.

“Well, then, I was born May 12th, same year, to a woman named Aideen.”


	19. Dom's Life Story

Dom is conceived out of wedlock by his father Commandant Brendol MacDougal and Aideen Whittaker, a seventeen-year-old waitress. Unable to care for the child, she goes to Brendol offering up their baby for ten thousand pounds. Brendol, eager to have a son and with none forthcoming from his wife, Martha, accepts the deal. While it is very possible that his father has made up the entire Dickensian tale, Dom can never confirm its suspected inaccuracy, since by the time he thinks to find his birth mother, she’s passed away. Nonetheless, it doesn’t stop Brendol from referring to him as the ten thousand pound boy, the misguided decision to raise a bastard, or the most expensive mistake, among other mean-spirited nicknames.

He’s sick a lot as a child.  Respiratory syncytial virus nearly kills him before he’s even walking. He’s hospitalized for a time, hooked up to a respirator, no doubt with his father nearby already regretting his investment. After this, he goes through a succession of ailments ranging from colds to the chicken pox to viral meningitis. Being sick all the time slows his development. He falls far behind where the doctors would prefer to see his tactile and cognitive progress. Though he’s old enough to enter his foundation year of school at 5, he’s not ready. It doesn’t stop Brendol from enrolling him despite the administrators’ advice to just give the poor sick kid some extra time. Dom remembers feeling lost all the time. The games played around him feel so complicated and the children talk so much. He struggles to understand those around him. He cries for his stuffed bunny, Lopsy, but his father would rather die than see a son of his wander around a classroom setting with a plush animal, and the teachers try to console him with other toy options. Every morning he hugs Lopsy extra tight, knowing that he won’t see her again for what feels like forever. Brendol’s opinion of his son as weak is cemented during this time and it will remain unmoved as long as the bitter man draws breath, regardless of any personal progress that Dom makes. He will see his son not as a University of St. Andrews graduate, nor as one of the finest tennis players Coach Anderson has ever seen, but as a scared underdeveloped little boy bawling for his Lopsy.

Dom’s immune system finally catches up to the world around it, giving him large periods of reprieve from the doctor’s office. He develops a love for numbers, enjoys moving them about only to have them be just as true regardless of which side of the equal sign they land. He reads Babar and Paddington. Then, he reads books that go over his head like A Wrinkle in Time. His bookish pursuits do not go unobserved by his classmates. He gets called a nerd, which somehow even to him feels unoriginal, and is the butt of many jokes and pranks. He doesn’t go running to his father or his stepmom, no chance they’d help him out if he did. He just takes it, expects that someday he’ll work out how to either become accepted by them or take his revenge on them; he’s always been the last one to figure things out, so why would this be any different? If there’s one thing that Dom has in spades, it’s patience. What he lacks is any love or affection.

Martha isn’t so much a stepmother really, as another child in the household run by Brendol. They take their meals separate from Brendol and it’s expected that she do the household chores, nothing feminine for Dom like washing dishes or folding laundry. He gets put on yard duty before he’s got enough muscles to control their rather formidable lawn mower. Brendol takes him shooting, not because he wants any father/son bonding moments, but because a man should know how to shoot a gun, especially his son who will naturally follow in his military footsteps. Domnhall will be a fourth-generation military man, Brendol doesn’t doubt this any more than he doubts that the sun will shine in summer, just takes it for granted in much the same way.

As expected, puberty hits Dom late. The few pubic hairs that his hormones manage to produce are spaced out below, like a penis attempting to grow a beard. He’s still shorter than most of his class. In choir, he’s positioned near the girls since he’s still singing in a higher octave. Luckily, he’s found so hopelessly pathetic by the other kids that no one questions why he isn’t trying to date the girls like every other boy. He has no interest in them. If he’s honest with himself, the boys don’t do much for him either at this point. He just wants to be by himself. He’s the only one that doesn’t judge him harshly for his slow development, his overly analytical mind, or his infrequency in laughing or smiling. He just wants to sit and read in the overstuffed chair that looks out onto the garden, eat some of the sweets that Martha bakes, or watch movies with magicians and dragons. He’ll grow up in time. He knows that. But there’s not much point in looking forward to it because then he’ll be in the military and they’ll turn him into his father. He’ll become hard and mean, quick to anger and stubbornly resistant to admitting when he’s wrong. He’ll kill people, or at least be responsible for the deaths of people, and collect his paycheck. He dreads the future like one would the change following a zombie bite, unpleasant and inevitable.

Amazingly, a girl named Taissa gets a crush on him. What she sees in him is beyond him, or any of their classmates, but they quickly latch onto the “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” monikers as one does when one is fourteen. They hold hands and she prattles on about Leonardo DiCaprio. She wants to recite lines from Titanic to each other. She says that she loves him as much Rose loves Jack. He likes hearing that she loves him and says it back, even thinks he believes it at the time. Their epic romance lasts a month and a half before the very true rumor spreads that she’s been kissing Linus O’Leary after school. He thinks he’s crushed, utterly destroyed, for about a week. Then, he’s fine, but he will hate Titanic for years. 

At fifteen, he hits his first growth spurt. He will have two more but the first one impacts him the worst. He actually becomes clumsy, unsure of his new arm and leg length. He has his first wet dream. An Adam's apple appears at the front of his neck. Worst though, he feels awful all the time. Mostly he feels sad. He listens to the Beatles and reads Harry Potter obsessively, to the point where he won’t be able to think of one without the other. 

Brendol either didn’t go through puberty or has amnesia about what it was like, because, true to his nature, he doesn’t have any empathy for what’s happening to Dom. For years, he’s made it no secret that he’s disappointed with how the fruit of his loins is ripening, but now with his teenage son acting like a teenager, he comes to actively despise him. Every word that Dom speaks is the wrong one. He wastes too much time studying for the GCSEs when he could be learning a practical skill but god help him if he brings home a less than perfect grade in any of his classes. If Dom listens to his music on his record player, Brendol rants about how anyone can listen to one album too much but if he listens on his headphones, he gets told to take them off because how will he be able to hear what Brendol is saying otherwise? It could be a coincidence, but Martha seems to distance himself from her step-son during this time, sensing that he’s doomed in his father’s eyes. They no longer share the occasional game of Yahtzee or Scrabble.

Then, Dom gets his first hit of love. Trevor Ruhl is tall and fat. His cheeks have zit scars and his fingers are like sausages, the nails always too long. He wears band t-shirts and bleaches blond streaks into his greasy brown hair. He is the sweetest person in the United Kingdom. He owns six dogs, five of which he rescued, he volunteers with his mum at a soup kitchen on a regular basis, and he absolutely from the bottom of his heart loves Dom. Dom’s an addict immediately. 

They meet when Trevor comments about Sabriel, the book Dom’s reading, just a casual “I like that book” or something like that, and Dom becomes suddenly long-winded, elated for the opportunity to share thoughts about a book with someone. On the grass out front of the school, they discuss necromancy for the entirety of lunch break. Before they go back inside, Trevor invites him over to his place after school. It’s dizzying, this thing that so many of his classmates would find mundane, and he says yes but he feels such trepidation all afternoon that he argues with himself about whether to excuse himself feigning illness. Dom knows that he’s a boring guy. He voluntarily matches his socks, he’s never been to a concert, and he quite literally has no friends. He feels like he’s already letting Trevor down just by being himself. The decision makes itself, though, when school lets out, and Trevor’s friendly eyes squish with his round-cheeked smile when he sees Dom. 

It’s not a friendship for long, only maybe a week’s worth of mutual pining, before Dom, euphoric with having found someone who likes spending time with him, kisses Trevor right on the lips, there in Trevor’s room with a poster of Tom Cruise’s vampire Lestat observing them judgmentally. Trevor kisses back, a lot. This isn’t like Taissa; he truly does fall in notebook heart-drawing, in-class letter-writing, initials on tree-etching love. Together they figure out sex, how it works and why there is such a fuss about it.  

Then comes his sixteenth birthday and, with it, the ultimatum from his father about enlisting. If Brendol’s demands had been made only a year earlier, before Dom had found value in himself through the eyes of his beloved, things absolutely would have gone differently. Instead, the times spent in Trevor’s arms have him thinking that maybe he’s an autonomous human being instead of his father’s mistake. Saying no to his father’s demand, the first time he can recall ever doing so, feels surreal. Standing on the street in front of his former house with bags in hand, he feels like a character from a movie, can almost see the camera’s zooming in on his expression of loss and confusion, then out again to take in the light rain that mists on him and everything he owns, a heavy-handed visual cue that not all is right in his life. Until he’s there in the strange hostel bed, watching people come and go, completely unsympathetic to his plight, it doesn’t truly hit him that this is happening.

The day after his birthday, Dom goes to school rather than looking for a job. It feels weird that his classmates can’t tell that he’s homeless just to look at him. Trevor can tell something is wrong before he opens his mouth, of course, but to everyone else, he’s just that weird guy hauling a bunch of bags down the hallway. He accompanies his boyfriend home, he thinks in order to brainstorm ideas for what to do, but instead, Trevor explains the situation to his mother in the hopes that she’ll take him in like a stray dog. Trevor’s mother, Alexis, is sweet like her son but beaten down by life in a way that Dom hopes his boyfriend never will be. He protests Trevor’s intervention, embarrassed that he needs the help and by his own parental defiance. When Alexis consents, with a plethora of rules and stipulations (she’s kind but not easily taken advantage of), Dom initially refuses. He wants the independence that he felt the night before. He wants to make something of himself by himself. Everything that has come to him so easily before were circumstances of his birth. He wants to prove to himself that he can rise up from the ashes, a freckled adolescent phoenix. 

But, Trevor convinces him not to let his pride stand in the way of the progress he can make not having to flip burgers rather than pursuing his education, and he agrees to Alexis’s conditions, becoming a temporary resident of the Ruhl household. 

For thirteen months, Dom wakes up in his shared bed with his boyfriend and at least two of the dogs. He does his research about schools and sends out applications to ones with sufficient business programs. With his grades and extracurriculars, it’s not surprising that he’s accepted. The bus ride is much longer than the one to his old school and he misses seeing his boyfriend throughout the day, but the place feels much more academic and he feels less like he has a giant target painted on his back for his nerdy interest. He finds an after-school job fairly quickly, a courier position that lasts only three hours in the evening, but all seven days. When he gets off work, he reheats his portion of family dinner while talking or playing board games with Trevor or Alexis. He curls back under the covers with Trevor at night. Sometimes they make very quiet love (it’s probably understood that they’re a couple but they’ve never so much as held hands in Alexis’s sight), sometimes they stay up and talk, and other times Dom is just too worn out from his busy day to do anything but sleep. 

Dom’s very part-time job doesn’t earn much, but he gives half of what he makes to Alexis. They don’t discuss whether it is enough, because she knows it’s all that he can afford, and she doesn’t refuse it because she understands that he needs to feel that he’s doing right. Most everything else, Dom saves for his eventual transition to real independence. When that time comes, when he’s offered a real, better paying job that’s farther still from the Ruhl household and it happens to coincide with a passable amount of money in his savings, he doesn’t hesitate. 

His first flat is a closet, but it’s pretty close to the HSBC branch where he now works as a teller, and it’s all his. His first month there he does three things that he’d never done in his father’s house and won’t even do again in his own flat. He eats a meal completely naked on a towel on the floor of the studio. He has no furniture, not even a bed, just the sleeping bag that Trevor has loaned him will do for now, so eating on a chair at a table is right out. He does it naked, not because he lacks clothes, but because he never has. He has sex with his boyfriend on the kitchen counter. He’s still not the tallest that he will be, but the counter is low enough that he doesn’t have to stand on tiptoe to fuck Trevor who knocks his head on the cupboard hard enough to see stars when he comes. Lastly, he eats an entire pie all by himself in one sitting. He feels like a cracked out junkie during a crash afterward, but it feels decadently wonderful at the time, like a rite of passage to adulthood.

He has to switch around his schedule so that he’s taking night classes and working during the day. The extra hours combined with school completely sap his energy and he gets really sick for the first time since he was a kid. At first, it begins as the flu which he ignores, but then it turns into pneumonia. He’s hospitalized for three days, arms poked with tubes carrying water and face covered by a respirator. The doctors chide him for having tried to power through it rather than rest. Being no stranger to the admonishments of medical professionals, he listens but tweaks what he hears to accommodate for his driven nature. 

It takes him a while to get back on his feet after that. Trevor plays nursemaid to him his entire recovery time and after so long spent at Dom’s apartment, just doesn’t leave after he gets better. More and more of Trevor’s things make their way to the tiny studio flat until they’re both living together on a fold-away bed which Alexis buys them. Dom feels oddly imposed upon by the new roommate, wants his territory to be his alone to inhabit. It creates the first fights between them. Every dirty sock in the bed, unwashed dish in the sink, or mud print by the door stack up until Dom could just about strangle his flatmate. The lack of personal time does the same to Trevor who starts feeling like a stranger just begging for attention in someone’s apartment. The eruption is unavoidable, but still devastating to both boys who are still very much in love but are no longer able to see it through. Trevor moves out and Dom feels like he can breathe again, even if the absence of dirty socks makes him feel alone.

Dom works hard. He completes his business degree and is hired for a junior analyst position at a company that folds before he can get promoted. 

His love life follows a similar trajectory. 

Wyatt, lover of all things geek, says that he can’t take any more of Dom’s badgering, that he’s supposed to be dating his boyfriend, not his mum. Dom decides to grow his hair out and though the look really suits him, at least he thinks so, it really isn’t professional and before he starts working at CCE Analytics he cuts it.

Terry, who shares none of his common interests save for orgasms, leaves him for someone better suited. Terry is so selflessly loving and doting that even though Dom knows in his brain that they’re both going to be better for it, he feels like his world has had all the oxygen sucked away from it when he leaves. He fills the empty space with Millicent, a beautiful independent orange kitten for whom one of his coworkers needs to find a home. He buys a bicycle, but finds navigating the city streets more harrowing than he’d like and, after enduring what has to be his fiftieth near-miss with a vehicle, he sells it.

Abbas, the human rights attorney who is as practical a man as ever Dom’s met, finds him too much of a control freak. He starts working at First Order Real Estate, a change of environment just to test out if he wants to go into Real Estate instead. He figures with his head for numbers, opportunities for investments would abound if he chose that career path.


	20. Happy New Year Ever After

“And then Millicent and I, we packed up everything and crossed the Atlantic so that I could manage my own team here in Boston.”

There had been a point, about halfway through his story, when the empty dishes sitting atop the duvet had been practically waving imaginary hands at him begging for a good scrub, so he’d had to pause just long enough to run them down to the sink at least. Now they’re both back to lying together, Dom the little spoon as he wraps up his entire history.

“Sorry that my story wasn’t very riveting. I really have had a pretty dull existence.”

Ben nuzzles the back of his neck. “Your story was just fine. Besides, it had me in it, in the end.”

Dom tsks. “Just like Ren, always making things about yourself.”

“Isn’t that what everyone does?”

“I suppose.” Dom grabs onto Ben’s hand and attempts to look over his shoulder but it’s too hard to see him that way since he’s no owl, so he flips over, bringing them face to face. “So, what happens now?” he asks. The whole process has been so sped up for them. They’ve known each other before meeting and now they’ve exchanged every personal detail of their lives within 24 hours of finding out the other is real. At this rate, they’ll be married before they go on a real date.

Ben smiles. “The continuing life sagas, I suppose.”

He touches fingers to Ben’s lips. “Shall I go brush?”

Strong arms wrap around Dom. “I think… that I’m okay with your breath as it is.”

Dom frowns. “Don’t be absurd. We can’t kiss now!” He struggles a bit, but the arms hold fast and a playful look flashes across Ben’s eyes that Dom recognizes. “Ben Organa. If you don’t release me this second, I shall not only refuse to kiss you, but I will promptly have troopers take you into custody when I next fall asleep.”

Ben feigns a look of fear at the threat. “Oh no! But how will they do that when I can just bend their minds to thinking that it’s you that should be under arrest?”

Shaking his head, Dom mutters, “Damn telepaths.” Then, with less teasing, “I’ll return quickly.”

“Do you want me... to make you stay?” The way that he asks isn’t threatening. He’s genuinely wanting to know what Dom would prefer and that deference is nice, something he wouldn’t expect from Kylo Ren. But then, maybe it would be. He’s never had Kylo Ren in his bed, something he hopes that his dream self will remedy immediately. 

“I’ve a better idea. Why don’t you join me? I’ve some mouthwash that I can personally vouch for you needing to use.” 

Ben smirks. “When you’re right, you’re right. Lead on General and I’ll follow.” He lets Dom go and the two make a very handsy trip to the loo. It’s odd, but their mouthwashing is flirtatious and there is something desperately intimate about passing the small plastic cup of green liquid after Dom himself as just filled it. They watch each other in the mirror, small knowing smiles upturned because they know what’s to come. Also, it feels like this is the first but not the last time they’ll do this. Their courtship has been skipped for this instant relationship that they’ve found themselves in.

“Is it better?” asks Ben, childishly breathing on Dom as they walk back down the hall to the bedroom. 

“Well, I would say it will no longer kill a yak.”

Ben catches him up in his arms before he can climb back into bed. He’s got his eyes firmly set on Dom’s lips and it makes his heart race to be held this way, looked at this way, by someone as beautiful as Ben. “I’m glad you’re real,” Ben says. “I think, I think I’d have sold my soul to dream about you while awake. And now I have.” 

Dom runs his hands up through Ben’s hair. He’s definitely going to make him grow it out. “Happy New Year, Ren.”

“Happy New Year, Hux.” Their lips, minty fresh and aching for each other, unite and it is hours before they again part.


	21. Confessions and Wine

At 2100 hours Primeday, Kylo Ren reaches his tipping point. It’s been four days since Hux started avoiding him, four days since they’ve had so much as a communique pass between them and here he is on the command deck considering which machine he could sabotage or which soldier he could kill that would best increase his chances of getting the general here and interacting with him. That’s when it finally clicks that he’s truly lost his mind and it’s all Hux’s fault. Well, he is done with the childish games, the subtle suggestive repartee, the stupid aching that he would have thought he was too well-trained to feel. With a determined flourish of anger and complete impatience, he leaves the command deck, no doubt startling the on-duty officers with his spontaneous exit and heads toward the command quarters. 

He doesn’t know what he’s going to say when he gets there. He tries several starts in his head, but they all sound idiotic. Most likely because they are. He comes to realize, as he approaches Hux’s private quarters, that this is best done out of mask, where maybe his facial expressions can convey something that his words, which are bound to sound Kalak-stupid, will not. He looks around almost guiltily before taking off his mask. He doesn’t often go without it, though here in command quarters, he’ll likely only run into the same higher level officers that may have seen him in the gym area. He prefers the air that circulates through his own mask to that of the system on the ship; The Finalizer always seems to smell of hydraulic fluid and smoke which greets his nose now.

He punches the door chime button with the large gloved hand not carrying his helmet and then pushes away the panic that threatens to set in at the action. He’s killed Jedi trainees, piloted the Ganymede through densely-packed asteroid belts, and formed the Knights of Ren; he can handle one conversation. Worst case scenario, he’ll just have to apologize to Snoke for having killed the commander of the First Order’s flagship. 

The door to Hux’s quarters open and Kylo steps into the brightly lit room. There’s a bottle and a glass beside a work console, a holovid program is running on a portable frame, and Hux is standing in a silky blue robe with surprise painted across his face. Surely, he’d checked to see who was at his door before permitting entrance, but then, he probably wasn’t expecting Kylo to be unmasked. Well, he’s seen his face before. No reason for him to get too hung up on Kylo Ren having a face now.

“You intrigue me,” he says, no preamble. It absolutely sounds like an accusation, as though instead of “intrigue” he’d said “shot.”

Hux’s face would be adorable if that was a word that Kylo was used to attributing to anything. His eyebrows furrow and his lips purse in a near pout as he attempts to connect what has just been said with anything going on that he’s aware of. Finally, obviously unable to make heads or tails of it, he goes with a haughty indignance, which is a good, reliable fallback for Hux. “And you befuddle me. Why are you here, Ren? In my quarters hours after my shift?”

They’re hardly friends, so stopping by unannounced could be considered rude, but it isn’t a crime worthy of capital punishment as Hux makes it sound. Still, his indignation only sparks Kylo’s because really it’s Hux’s fault that he’s become so utterly subject to his emotions as of late, useless when not in Hux’s immediate presence and barely better than that when he is.

“Because it’s getting worse! Because I want to break every piece of machinery on the ship just to make you angry with me.”

There, he’d laid it out. He looks around the room, almost as if he’s thinking about destroying things in this room in particular. His gloved hands clench and unclench. 

As usual, that snotty even-keeled voice of Hux’s manages to sound both patronizing and antagonizing at the same time. “For starters, don’t.” Hux grabs his glass of whatever neon green liquid he’s been drinking. He empties the glass, obviously feeling stressed by the situation of having one of the galaxy’s most powerful men in his quarters, angry and speaking madness. “You anger me just fine without destroying my ship. Would you care to share why it is that you’ve made driving me mad your life’s goal?”

Kylo angrily sits on a tall-backed plush-cushioned sofa. He then angrily removes his gloves and gently, but still angrily, sets his helmet next to the gloves on the narrow table in front of the sofa. He isn’t sure why he does either, other than he has a lot of energy that needs to be directed somewhere. Almost immediately after, he angrily stands. Hux watches him the entire time, as though trying to figure out a puzzle or maybe just waiting to see what happens.

“It’s the only time you talk to me.”

“Okay,” says Hux considering. “No, wait. Ren, you’re not making much sense.”

He crosses the short distance between them. Unlike anyone else on board the Finalizer would, Hux doesn’t look worried when he does this, only appears expectant, as though maybe whatever Kylo says next will explain everything. There probably are proper words but Kylo, a man of few words and many actions, is not the one to create them. Instead, he reaches out one ungloved hand to Hux’s face, stops just short of touching it, and sends how he’s feeling through the force, just puts it all out there and floats it into Hux’s mind. 

Hux drops his glass as the contained unit of emotions floods into his brain. Kylo force catches it, an inconsequential amount of energy required, but impressive because of his speed in doing so while already transferring thoughts to Hux. It floats back onto the computer panel. Kylo never looks away from Hux.

“Oh.” says Hux, getting it finally. 

Attachment is a casualty, it compromises the strong, weakens them. Kylo’s never felt so weak. He waits for Hux’s reaction, expecting the snark, for it to be used against him as a weapon. His waiting shows respect, because he doesn’t just take the information from Hux’s head. He tries to read just by Hux’s pale face how the news is being received. 

“That’s why you’ve been making my life a kriffin’ hell?” Hux sounds incredulous rather than angry, but it certainly has the earmarks of going that direction. “You… Do you know that we had to re-order the parts for the UTJ56 from three different planets? And you broke it… to get my attention?”

Kylo won’t let any shame show on his face. What’s done is done. Instead, he maintains eye contact and carefully answers. “Yes.”

Hux raises his hand, strangely ungloved, to his forehead, to the spot, Hux’s stress spot. “If I could use the force…” he starts. Then, he raises his other hand there as well, an impressive display of the rare double stress spot touch. “Next time Ren, just use your bloody words. Ask me for a fuck. It’s not that kriffin’ hard.” Then, quietly, Hux begins to go over some of the acts that Kylo’s taken to be noticed. “The squad leader who committed suicide… Oh, and there was the day that you..”

Kylo goes over Hux’s words, not the useless ones about suicidal squad leaders, but the ones about asking him for sex, as though that’s all he wants. Even with the force, was he still not able to adequately explain to Hux the way that he wants the commander’s attention? He grabs one of Hux’s hands. The action makes Hux jump. He tries to free his hand but Kylo holds firm. “I want more.”

The color is in Hux’s cheeks, anger and alcohol, and he positively scowls at Ren’s hand, as though it offends him deeply, but it’s the words he responds to. “You always want more. You are spoiled and greedy.” Kylo tightens his grip, wanting to punish Hux for the words even if they aren’t true. It works, to some degree, shuts Hux up as he evaluates the situation. Then, passion leaving his voice, he speaks, “I can’t imagine what you expected, coming to me this way.”

What had he been hoping would happen? Yes, he’d been hoping they’d fuck until one or both of them were raw, any which way Hux wanted to go about it, but what would happen after that? Would they hold hands on the command deck? Why not have a traditional Corellian marriage ceremony on the mythical planet of Yote Ruy which never rained but is nonetheless lush with beautiful plants and flowers? Hell, Ben’s parents and Uncle Luke could attend and a Solocorn would prance up to them to finalize the ceremony. 

This is Hux. Everything about Hux is cold and hard and mean. The man has been working to create a weapon that will destroy multiple planets. Obviously, he’s not going to reciprocate these stupid weak emotions of love that have been crippling Kylo Ren for months. This, his own stupid weakness, is why he began training with Snoke in the first place. He seems incapable of living up to his potential, to the great ends that come with his powers, because his heart has always made him so vulnerable. Baring that vulnerability to Hux was a mistake.

He avoids looking into Hux’s eyes as he releases his hold, instead watches his own boot-clad feet on the grey metal floor. “Right,” he says. This is what rash actions cause. He’s done enough reckless things to have ample demonstration of their negative repercussions. He should know this by now. “I’ll go.” 

Hux doesn’t stop him as he collects his gloves and helmet, and he doesn’t linger long; he can put them back on in the hall. Kylo doesn’t even so much as glance at Hux’s face before leaving. It would crush him too much, more than he already is, if Kylo saw amusement on his face, saw that he was enjoying his suffering. 

He doesn’t put the helmet back on, not even though he could hide his shame. He deserves the shame because he’d known it was a bad idea to reveal his feelings, but done it anyway. He wants to feel the punishment that naturally comes to him. Let anyone that passes him in the distance between his quarters and Hux’s see his humiliation. 

He doesn’t cry, but his throat catches like he can’t quite swallow down his disappointment. He replaces the helmet carefully on its designated place. The gloves, he throws on his bed. Those are provided by the First order; they have no meaning and are easily replaced. His mind replays the scene, tries to view it from the outside looking in. It looks like a melodramatic romance holovid. One man confessing his love like a fool while the other just looks confused. Well, it wouldn’t be a very popular holovid.

His force senses are dulled with his self-debasing meltdown, but he’s too strong in the force to not feel Hux approaching his quarters. Assuring himself that Hux will walk past, he’s startled by the sounding of his door chime. He considers putting on his helmet but determines that it would be a cowardly act to use the helmet not as a symbol of power but as a means to hide his emotional frailty.

He presses the button with his powers from the bedroom where he is. Let Hux experience the uncertainty of having to find him in his quarters. 

Kylo hears the woosh of the doors, then, the infinitesimally small click of Hux’s boots on the metal floor. Hux appears in the doorway of his bedroom looking not smug but determined, lips pressed as flat as ever Kylo’s seen them and jaw tight, muscle visible as he clenches. He’s no longer wearing the robe, but the outfit is not his standard uniform either, just a shirt and pants. As with the gym, it’s alluring to see him in something other than his uniform, like he’s just caught Hux naked in the shower or something. 

“You exasperate me,” accuses Hux.

“And you distract me,” replies Kylo. There are many things that Hux’s existence does to him. He could list half the possible verbs available in his vocabulary and they would probably apply to their dynamic. “Why are you here then? In my quarters so long after your shift?” He hopes to annoy Hux with his parroting.

“Because I’m concerned that if I don’t offer myself up to you, we’ll be floating on a derelict hull that used to be my ship with a crew full of dead bodies.” 

Kylo tries, and fails, to stop the corner of his lips from quirking up at the humorous exaggeration, and, of course, the use of the words “offer myself.” “You needn’t sacrifice yourself for the safety of The Finalizer. As I said, I’m through breaking things to get your attention.”

Hux’s mouth loosens a bit, lips become lips again instead of white-pressed lines. “No need. You have it.” 

Kylo tilts his head, considering. Hux is infinitely better at verbal subtlety than he will ever be. “I want more than your attention.”

“You mentioned that, I believe.” The little apple in Hux’s throat bobs up as he swallows, a nervous look accompanying it, eyes darting to the side. “You also have my interest.”

Kylo’s hope soars despite the rejection that just occurred in Hux’s quarters. 

“Nearly everything I know about you,” Hux says. “Pisses me off. You’re selfish and used to having your way, you disrupt plans with your impulsive choices, you have mystical powers which I neither comprehend nor feel comfortable with, you wear a bucket on your head that my men find daunting and I find ridiculous, and you go out of your way to drive me to this furious state, which I have long suspected but finally have had you confirm just now.” 

Kylo’s hopefulness vanishes, even while he senses that there is a greater point to Hux’s words than meets the ear. It isn’t as though he hasn’t been taken to task by him before, but he does hope that there is more to the list of grievances than just Hux’s reasons why he does not reciprocate Kylo’s feelings.

Hux sighs. “That being said, you are not entirely without merit. When you’re not being an idiot, you are quite bright. You are a remarkable asset when you’re not being a tremendous burden on me and my men. And, you are not physically unappealing to me, when you are not wearing a replica of your grandfather’s bucket.”

Kylo can actually feel his hand twitch, the sharp nerve-ending quick desire to lash out with the force barely restrained within him. It is one thing to mock him, but to mock Darth Vader is blasphemous, unpatriotic at the least for a member of the First Order. He glares at Hux, keeps himself in check, unable to form a rebuke through his anger. The effects of his words do not go unnoticed by Hux, who meets his glare with steadfastness, accepting his role in whatever comes to pass as consequence. 

“What do you propose then? In this situation, where you apparently have developed certain feelings for me that I do not dismiss outright? Or have you gotten that far in your thinking?”

Kylo absolutely hasn’t thought anything out. Not dismissing outright is a far cry from where he wants to be but is also a tremendous distance from where they could be, with Hux laughing in that cold heartless way at his attempt. “Stay… a while. Talk with me.”

“Just easy conversation among shipmates?” asks Hux sarcastically. “Or do you intend to recite me poetry?”

Kylo has stayed still, not wanting to spook Hux, treating him as something much more fragile than he is, but he steps towards him now. He always forgets they’re the same height until times like this when they’re close together and their eyes are on the same level, in this case, neither set averting.

“Just talking. I’m sure someone with your intelligence can manage that.” 

Hux’s eyes roll. “Saraboth save me,” he sighs dramatically. “Fine.”

 

 

He never expected to be in Ren’s quarters, so, obviously, he hadn’t spared much thought as to what they’d be like. He probably could have guessed that there would be a shrine. The creepy Vader mask is congruent with what he believes Kylo Ren would find appropriate in bedroom decor. The bottle of wine which Ren pulls from his closet is surprising. Aren’t Siths supposed to be like monks? Hux rarely feels so out of place, and never on his own ship. At least Ren’s expression and uncoordinated movements indicate that he has no more idea why Hux is in his quarters than he does. He motions for Hux to return to the main room which contains a seating area, intended for leisure and social dynamics, a computer, and some more storage cabinets complete with a small refrigeration unit. Hux notes the travel-range for cooking. Troopers are banned from having them, better that they all eat the same foods at the same locations, but most of the officers on The Finalizer have them. As he’s never seen Ren in the officers’ mess hall slurping food through holes in his mask, he guesses that he cooks all of his food here to keep up mystique. Maintaining that image must be terribly isolating.

Ren sets the blue and white labeled bottle on a small metal table in front of where Hux sits on the galaxy’s least comfortable sofa. He’d had his own replaced, allowed himself the indulgence of cushions that did not feel like they were made of laminasteel, and appreciates the reminder of why he took the time to do so.

Before sitting himself, Ren finds some glassware, one glass and one mug, and sets them next to the bottle. Hux takes the glass, lest he be the one stuck using a mug to drink wine, and Ren pops the top off the bottle with the force. 

‘Handy,’ thinks Hux. They needn’t even bother with corkscrews.

Ren pours the wine for both of them, this time with his hands, which is much less impressive. Hux looks down at the light pink color inside the glass. For a moment, he thinks of poison, which makes him think of his father. He attempts to push the thought away, though it tarries longer when he notices that Ren hasn’t picked up his own wine. Highly unlikely that Ren would poison him in his own quarters with a sealed wine bottle. After sniffing it, he asks, “Andoan wine?”

Ren nods in confirmation. “It isn’t poisoned.”

Hux squeezes the glass tightly. He hadn’t felt a thing, yet Ren had plucked the thought from his head like a mental pickpocket. “Words, Ren, are how two people generally communicate. A conversation is not merely thought banditry.” 

“Of course.” Ren pinches absentmindedly at his earlobe, looking not particularly repentant, more like he’s attempting to solve a complex riddle. “Listening makes it easier. And your thoughts are…” He holds both hands up above his lap as though he’s holding a box. “More structured… than most.”

“Great, so I’m easier to spy on than most.” As a man who works beneath and beside telepaths, this was not the best news.

Ren shakes his head. “No, not easier. You’re more inside like you appear on the outside.” The hands come together, palms pressed flat. “You assign your thoughts like you do your crew to different places on The Finalizer. It isn’t everyone wandering around looking for a task.” 

He’s flattered. His entire life has been about control, controlling himself or others. To hear someone acknowledge that it’s working, on both fronts, is pleasing in a way for which he immediately chastises himself. “Yes, well, that doesn’t mean that I want you rummaging around in my head, organized or not.” He sips from the glass. It’s delicious, light and crisp. It’s better than the last time he’d had Andoan wine, a better year maybe. The mug still sits in front of Ren, untouched on the table. “You’re not drinking,” Hux notes. 

“I’m not much of a drinker,” says Ren.

“Brilliant.” He takes a large swallow of the wine. “Why do you have it, then? If you don’t drink?”

Ren shrugs. “An impulse. I also have a bottle of Mummergy.”

“That is an acquired taste under the best of circumstances,” says Hux, tipping back more of the delicate drink. He should drink it slower, but he likes the way it dances on his tongue. “Disgusting stuff, actually.”

“You find Mummergy too sweet?” 

Hux nods. “It  _ is _ too sweet.”

“But this?” asks Ren, gesturing to the near-empty glass in Hux’s hand.

“Very good. Nice and light.” As Hux answers, Ren lifts the bottle with his mind, tips it to fill the glass. “Do I need to accustom myself to objects floating randomly while I’m around you?” In all honesty, it hadn’t startled him like it should have. Silly force parlor trick, hates that even in just the smallest, nearly imperceptible way it pleased him.

“I’m glad that it meets with your approval.”

‘I was talking about the wine,’ he says, sure that Ren has misunderstood his praise somehow. “Are you going to try it?” It’s making him nervous that Ren hasn’t partaken of even a drop of the drink when he’s already imbibed a full glass, even though he knows, reasonably, that there’s almost no chance that the wine’s been compromised. A guilty conscience. “I know it’s not poisoned.”

“But it’s reminding you of another poisoned drink?”

He hadn’t expected an inquisition when he’d agreed to this little chat and the last thing that he wants to think of right now, or ever, is Brendol. He switches to First Order business because that’s his comfort zone. “Now that we have half of the map to Skywalker…”

“Enough.” 

It seems that both father-figures are unwelcome in this night’s exchange. Though, it’s possible that Ren hadn’t seen enough to know the relationship in Hux’s mind between poison and fathers. He looks down into the wine as though trying to divine his own future or to see images from his past. “Not a drink, but poison,” he says softly. “It felt… necessary.”

Ren picks up the mug. His hands look ridiculous wrapped around the tiny handle, like a giant in a fairy story trying to drink tea. Hux would be able to handle the mug gracefully, with his irritatingly delicate hands placing themselves easily on the ceramic. At times Ren seems oafish, a direct counterpoint to his usual smooth, nearly liquid, movements, like when they’d played goothball or when he strides around the ship, loose fabric flapping around him. Ren sips at the drink. He doesn’t make a face, one way or the other, about the taste. 

“It may be necessary for me to kill... the man that was my father.”

So, yes, Ren had picked up the subject of his thoughts and now he was running on that thread with the conversation. Is that what romance was to Kylo Ren, commiserations over patricide? It doesn’t even feel inappropriate. “Indeed.” Hux considers for a moment. “What was he like, your father?” He doesn’t pussyfoot around the connection as Ren had.

“Absent.”

“He wasn’t around? Was that what was so terrible?” Hux would have paid good money to not have Brendol around. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t so much that Brendol was around all the time, but he was always around when Armitage hoped he wouldn’t be. If he was doing something wrong or if he failed in an attempt to do something, Brendol would materialize, a manifestation, the round red-face of judgment. 

“No. When he was around, he would make…” Ren corrects himself mid-thought. He’d been about to say mother, Hux suspects, is proven right almost immediately. “He would argue with his wife. She would be angry about what he’d been doing. Who he’d been doing. She has enough of the force in her to have a sense of what. And, when he stayed around for longer than usual, he’d get mad at her. He thought that they’d done their part to bring down the Empire and they shouldn’t have to rebuild the Republic. They couldn’t be in the same room for more than an hour without it turning into yelling. So, he just stayed away for longer and longer.’

“So, for that you want him dead?” asks Hux. If all he’d had to deal with was minor parental bickering, Brendol Hux would still be alive.

“No, I don’t care about him. He is insignificant. I’ll only seek his death if he stands in my Master’s way.”

“And what about your mother? From what I understand, she’s already trying to stand in your master’s way.”

Ren thinks quietly while Hux finishes the second glass. He doesn’t wait for silly force pouring, just reaches over and decants more wine himself.

“She won’t die by my hand. I’ve seen it.”

“Interesting. And what other prognostications do you have? Anything in my future I should be aware of?” Hux is skeptical. It’s silly to doubt Ren’s powers when he’s seen them in use, but fortune telling always seemed to be the thing of hustlers, not anyone genuinely skilled. Those that can’t use the force don’t generally pretend to be able to shoot lightning from their fingertips, but guessing that you’ll be faced with hardships in the days ahead? Now that is definitely more for their ilk.

“I’ve seen nothing, but the series of events seems likely from anyone observing. You’ll be the one that leads the First Order to victory. Snoke will never give you the Fleet Admiral title that you deserve, but you’ll perform all of its duties.”

The first part sounds like wishful flattery. While Hux has confidence in the abilities of the First Order, their victory is far from assured. The second part sounds incredibly likely. He’s never been the type to back down from hard work, even when the duties of the job don’t include those responsibilities. 

“And you’ll be killed by one of your father’s failed recruits. One that takes issue with being brainwashed and manipulated into giving up their life fighting for a cause that isn’t theirs.”

Hux’s jaw clenches, anger flooding into the relaxed alcohol-soaked parts of his head. “I find that unlikely. The training process, while not flawless, has secondary protocols in place for any less than perfect results.”

“You hate the man enough to murder him but you still have a little boy’s faith in his program.” 

Hux glares lightsabers at Ren. “The results are sufficient for my faith. You’ve worked with my troopers. They’re exemplary soldiers. Have you ever seen one that wasn’t highly efficient and unquestionably loyal? You can see into their minds, so you would know better than I. Have you sensed even one departing from his allegiance?”

“Not yet.”

Ren obviously has no idea of what he speaks. He doesn’t know the reliability of the psychological methods employed. He resents the implication that the system is doomed to fail. He resents more that Ren thinks there may be lingering paternal loyalty, a ridiculous concept considering that he was the one who ordered Phasma to remove Brendol permanently from the universal landscape. 

“What would you know about building a functional system? All you know is how to destroy. You’re like a reek in a glass shop.”

“I made my lightsaber.”

“Yes, a tool for destruction! Great example, Ren. You are an inspiration to creators everywhere.”

They’re both pouting, Ren openly and Hux internally.

“You talk more when you’re drunk,” says Ren.

“That is true.” 

The quiet that follows eases Hux’s mood or maybe that’s just the alcohol. He’s never the type that’s needed to chatter to keep social awkwardness at bay, and he knows that to be true of Ren who rarely speaks, and who, when he does, tends to make situations more tense, not less. So, they both naturally calm sitting there in the rec area of Ren’s apartment. 

“The day that I arrived, you looked… like The Finalizer,” says Ren.

“I looked like my ship?” 

“Made of cold metal.” While Hux has never been compared to a ship, that he knows of, “cold” and “made of steel” he’s certainly heard before.  “You were already so angry with me. You were worried I was trying to steal your command.”

“I was not,” Hux objects. “I am quite secure in my position here, indispensable. I just suspected that you would make that position more effort, and I was right.” Ren seems skeptical but doesn’t argue. If he’d been in Hux’s head as far back as then, it’s likely that he knows that Hux isn’t being entirely honest. “If you do kill him, it won’t change what already passed.”

Ren looks at him, eyes clear and searching.

“It won’t fix anything in your head, won’t right any wrongs. The only thing that will change is that he’ll be dead,” Hux doesn’t hear any emotion in his own voice. These are the facts as he knows them. 

Ren nods, understanding. 

They sit for many more minutes, occasionally sharing a glance, but not speaking. Then, Hux sets down his glass, thanks Ren for the wine, and rises to leave. They stand awkwardly by the door and Hux wonders if Ren will kiss him. Instead, he touches a hand to Hux’s, just light fingers on his knuckles. 

“Thank you for the conversation,” says Ren.

Hux is almost drunk enough to initiate a kiss, but not quite. They’re not quite there, he thinks. He realizes that he’d been hoping when following Ren back here to make a 6’2” mistake tonight, but instead it feels like he’s fallen into a more dangerous situation. “Goodnight, Ren.”

“Goodnight, Hux.”


	22. Ren Loses To A Girl

Everything is white, the ground, his vision, his pain, everything but the warm red blood that streaks the snow. The battle’s over then and he’s lost. Oh, he beat Snoke’s challenge to him, but where is the victory in that? Stabbing an old unarmed man that he used to call father. And then, watching the girl’s power in the force grow before his very eyes, things he’s done only after years of training coming to her in minutes. He deserves to bleed out here, to stay on this planet, let it tear him up with it. 

Instead, he hears a familiar voice call out. “Ren!” Only one person calls him that, because it’s a title shared within every member of the Knighthood and not a name, but Kylo’s never corrected it anyway because it sounds right when Hux says it. In his defeated exhausted state, he could even admit to himself that it’s because it sounds close to his former name, who he was when he could still have been redeemed. When Hux says it, there’s acceptance of the duality to himself. And it could be wishful thinking, the ravings of a lunatic bleeding to death in a snowstorm on an exploding planet, but it’s not the first time he’s thought it.

It’s hard to make out the details of Hux’s face at first, the whiteness blocking his eyes. The little cap that sits atop Hux’s head is fuzzy, undefined. But then, slowly, the green eyes beneath the silly hat come into focus and the pinched mouth. Hux looks scared. How bad must he look for Hux to look scared?

Kylo’s on his knees, one shoulder against a snow-covered tree. He can’t feel much where his body touches the snow. Has he been out long enough for frostbite? Time seems distorted, like it’s already been days ago that he killed Han Solo, murdered him in cold blood to prove himself to… well, to anyone that would give a damn that he’d done it, to anyone that would look at him and say, “You’ve done a good job.” Isn’t that what it was all about in the long run, all of it?

“Ren, can you hear me?” yells Hux. He has to yell to be heard over the sound of explosions and the pulsing in Kylo’s ears.

He stretches out a hand to Hux who, while wary, doesn’t flinch. He pulls with his gloved hand on the back of Hux’s neck and pulls him closer. Yes, he can see the freckles now too. Good, so it’s only emotional shock and not actual nerve damage. “Get me back to the ship,” he orders softly.

Hux nods. He rises up from the squatting position he’d been in and orders the soldiers nearby. “Quick, carry him.”

“I can walk,” he objects, rising to a full stand only with the help of the tree. “Just lead me.”

Hux looks annoyed by the response. Yes, it would save time if the men carried him to the ship. He’s a liability in his current state, a broken man slowing the progress of the group off the planet. But, they have time. He can feel the planet’s process through the force like feeling his own circulatory system after a workout. It’s going to explode, but not before they get off of it. He doesn’t explain this to Hux, just stares at him, waits for acceptance or refusal. Kylo doesn’t want to have to kill any troopers that try to haul him like a sack of lothal grain. 

“Keep up or I’ll order them to carry you.”

It’s a perfectly Hux thing to do, to threaten him at a time like this. Unable to stop himself, even with the pain and the dizziness, he gasps out a chuckle. The sound is lost to the sound of fire and quakes. 

“I’ll follow you,” he swears. 

For the briefest of seconds, Hux looks at him as though he understands that there is more meaning there than Kylo had intended. Then, he’s off towards the shuttle.

Amazingly, Kylo keeps up with the quick pace. The shuttle is also white and he would never have been able to have seen it in the snow without Hux leading the way, or maybe without the three troopers guarding the doors, waiting for their arrival before fleeing, but it still feels like it’s the heartless redhead alone that is saving him. 

He takes a seat next to Hux, watches as the troopers pile in and the door shuts. Everything is still so white. In fact, it looks worse in here, brighter, and it feels too hot. He pulls at the black wrap he keeps around his neck, hurls it to the ground. He just needs to cool off. The explosions grow louder or do they just sound that way? And the shuttle is making a terrible high-pitched squeal that’s drowning out his thoughts.

“Ren? Ren!” 

Then the whiteness becomes black and the grief/fear/anger/despair/shame disappears, lost to the nothingness of unconsciousness.

 

 

“Congratulations!” 

There are two things which Hux could be referring to. One, he could be congratulating him for killing his father and thus joining Hux’s Club De Patricide. Two, he could be sarcastically congratulating him for allowing his father’s group to infiltrate and sabotage Starkiller Base, which effectively landed a mortal blow to the First Order, and, probably in addition, getting his formally trained ass handed to him by some random teenager from a junkyard planet who picked up her first lightsaber that day. Kylo is none too pleased about either option, feels quite sulky about both, but waits to hear the general out before force-strangling him from the med cot. 

“1.8 liters of blood lost! They tell me if you had lost more than 2 liters, you wouldn’t be alive... nor glaring at me like you wish it had been me instead.” There’s something more casual in Hux’s presence today, something that seems happier. Kylo can’t help but wonder if that’s caused by the pleasure of seeing him disabled in medical, robots and machines around him checking his vitals and infusing him with nutrients. 

“I’d been expecting a different response from you.” Kylo looks away, fiddles with the tube that feeds into his arm. He’s better, will probably return to his quarters soon, all the better to avoid interactions like this, people seeing him vulnerable. He wouldn’t want to lose his spectral reputation. Though, perhaps that’s already lost along with the tremendous weapon he’d failed to protect.

Surprisingly, Hux leans, a stance Kylo’s never seen him take, body tilting right shoulder first into the bulkhead nearest his cot. “Oh, you’ll berate yourself far worse than I ever could about Starkiller Base.” It should disturb him that Hux is growing to know the inner workings of his mind so well, but instead, it warms him. He’s reminded of how he’d accused Hux of trusting him without a rational reason to do so. It goes both ways. Neither of them can be trusted, but it appears that they do regardless. “Unless you were referring to Han Solo. In which case, it was necessary, and hardly worthy of praise or rebuke.” 

“The timing could have been better,” Kylo offers.

Hux waves a dismissive hand. Then, “The outcome could have been better. The timing was… what it was.”

He’s never seen Hux in this mood, so quick to forgive, so easily accepting of the huge loss to the First Order. It’s unnerving. Hux should be furious, lips erased with rage, and fingers rubbing the skin off the forehead spot. Instead, he looks like he just got laid or like he’s drunk. 

“How did you secure a shipment of Andoan wine so quickly out here?” asks Kylo. 

One side of Hux’s mouth tweaks upward, an admission. “Being general is not without its perks, Ren. Surely you’ve found some benefits to being a knight.”

There’s a fascinating honesty to drunk Hux that he likes. “I’ve seen that it gets me shot.” Hux laughs in response. It’s restrained, quiet and brief, but still counts as a laugh. Kylo wonders how drunk he is. “You don’t seem too upset about the way things turned out.”

Hux shrugs, the gesture pushing him off the wall and back. “It could have been worse.”

Kylo had killed his father, gotten shot by a bowcaster and nearly died of blood loss, discovered and been defeated by a powerful enemy, and allowed the First Order’s greatest weapon to be destroyed. Hux’s pessimism is beyond comprehension if he thinks it could have been worse. “How?”

“It could have been 2.1 liters.”


End file.
